Poetry Friday: Thoughts on Stevenson and Candlelight

When I was little, my family had a card game called Authors. The goal was to collect as many entire sets of "books" (each card was a different book) of the different authors as you could. It's not any Angry Birds, that card game, but we loved it.

For some reason I was drawn to Robert Louis Stevenson (you can see him at the far right of the middle row in the image above.) Even if I didn't have any of his cards at the outset, I would still cross my fingers and hope that I ended up with all four of the Stevenson cards. Maybe this was because of all the authors in the game, he was the only one looking directly at me. And those eyes!

But it might also have been because I had a book as a toddler called The Bumper Book - many of the poems in it were written by Stevenson, so I already loved the sound of his voice before I was old enough to read any of the novels he wrote which were listed in the card game. One poem I remember well, and it comes to me all summer long in Seattle, where the sun stays up in the sky until almost 10:00 at night:

Bed in Summer

IN winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

I'm sure my own kids thought of that poem when I told them it was time to stop reading and get to bed at 8:00 on a July night.  And my grandson is probably thinking of it when his mom puts him to bed, too. The days are getting shorter now - Autumn has arrived - and I will soon get that "yellow candlelight" feeling when I go to bed. I do love that poem.

Lately drawn to compression - and to the idea of happiness - this Stevenson poem is my current favorite:

The world is so full of a number of things, 

I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings. 

I'm not sure I should like that poem as much as I do. All my advice to beginning poets focuses on the need for specificity - "No abstractions!" - and naming things. So what does "a number of things" tell me, specifically? Well, specifically nothing. Or unspecifically, everything. That's part of its charm. You can make of it what you will - you can be happy with just about anything on any day, and that little couplet pops into your mind. 

Robert Louis Stevenson - Portrait by John Singer Sargent, 1888

Those two lines of poetry inspired my most recent post on Books Around the Table, which is all about cultivating curiosity. If you do that, the world will be "so full of a number of things" that you can't help but be amazed - and happy - and a better writer. 

If that makes me sound wise or overwise, here's what Stevenson had to say about that: "To be overwise is to ossify; and the scruple-monger ends by standing stockstill." Wise man, Stevenson, but not overwise. I think I'll read his wonderful travel journal, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, again, a little each night at bedtime, though not by candlelight. 

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The Poetry Friday round-up this week is over at Amy Ludwig VanDerWater's blog, The Poem Farm. Head over there to see what other people have posted.

Poetry Friday: Learning How to Hover

Robert Francis 1901-1987

 

Contemplating the small hummingbirds in our garden this early September, I offer up another small poem written by Robert Francis, (last week's poem about the farm boy was by RF, too) who was contemplating advice from his not-so-small mentor, Robert Frost.


To the Ghost of Robert Frost

"You've got to learn to hover,"
He said. The way a hummingbird
Hovers over a flower, the way
The flower's fragrance hovers over it.
Not to move on, not to
Keep jumping like a nervous grasshopper
But to hover there until you
Have gathered all that is there
For you or anyone to gather.
"You've got to learn to hover."

This is at the heart of what a poet needs to learn how to do, of course - not flit like a butterfly, not chirp like a nut hatch, not swoop like a swallow, not scold like a crow, but hover.

Definitely knew how to hover....

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The Poetry Friday round-up today is hosted by Laura over at AUTHOR AMOK. Head over there to see what other people have posted.

Poetry Friday: "His mind holds summer...."

Farm Boy: 1940 by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration

We all know that when August ends, summer ends, no matter what the official last day of the season, and no matter how hot the weather. The word "September" is not a summer word, it's a First-Day-of-School word. So, in honor of  tomorrow, August 31, I offer up this after-summer poem by Robert Francis:

Farm Boy After Summer

A seated statue of himself he seems.
A bronze slowness becomes him. Patently
The page he contemplates he doesn't see.

The lesson, the long lesson, has been summer.
His mind holds summer, as his skin holds sun.
For once the homework, all of it, was done.

What were the crops, where were the fiery fields
Where for so many days so many hours
The sun assaulted him with glittering showers.

Expect a certain absence in his presence.
Expect all winter long a summer scholar,
For scarcely all its snows can cool that color.

Kentucky schoolhouse, 1940 - photo by Mary Post Wolcott for the FSA

Of course, there's no better way to end summer than by going to a county fair - ours is usually the Island Country Fair out on Whidbey Island or the Northwest Washington Fair in Whatcom County. You get to say goodbye to summer in one dusty, exhausting, glorious visit, taking in things like this:

 The rooster crowing contest...

 and the newborn piglets... 

  the prize-winning peaches...

and pickles...

 and the ferris wheel...

the kids' collections...

and the kids's art...

the blue-ribbon quilts...

and the milk cows....

 

the corn on the cob and...

...the corn dogs and funnel cakes.

I'm a true admirer of the 4-H kids and Future Farmers of America who have led their animals (after hosing them down and prettying them up) around the judging rings over the years in hopes of praise from the judges.  And I love it when a kid steps forward in the goat barn to tell me all about how to make goat cheese. I hold the thought of that kid for a long time, well into colder weather.

It's true, my mind "holds summer" and my "skin holds sun." I get serious in autumn, which as Northrup Frye theorized, is the season of tragedy. And I can get through winter in a good mood, usually, with satire to help me.  At least, until about February - by then, the rain and the gray days make me begin to fantasize about primroses, and way off the sound of carny music on the midway and the smell of kettle corn.  Then comes spring, and the primroses, and who doesn't love spring? But summer....the season of full belief...? Can you do anything but love it? It comes out of the blue and bowls you over. And when it's gone, your skin holds it.

"...for scarcely all it snows can cool that color."

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The Poetry Friday round-up this week is being hosted by Tara at A Teaching Life. Head there to see what other people have posted.  And if you have time, catch this video from the New York Time Frugal Traveler, all about the Kandiyohi County Fair in Minnesota.

Poetry Friday - John Hollander's Double Dactyls

John Hollander - Imagine studying poetry with this man....

Last Saturday, when I heard that the poet John Hollander had died, I pulled several of his books off my shelves to look through them and think about his work, which I've grown to love more and more over the years. I had a flirtation with it early on, due to the double dactyl form he invented with Anthony Hecht, another favorite poet of mine. The flirtation deepened when I began to read his more serious work, which I recommend to everyone (just look at "Adam's Task.")   But today, I want to stay focused on those double dactyls.

The definition of a double dactyl sounds simple: eight lines of two dactyls each, arranged in two quatrains. The first line of the poem must be nonsense (like “Higgledy-piggledy” or “Jiggery-pokery”) and the second line must be a name; the fourth and eighth lines are dactyls followed by spondees, and they rhyme; and one line of the poem (often the 6th or 7th) must be a single six-syllable word. Of course, the killer in that list of must-haves is the six-syllable word in dactylic meter, and the whole poem hinges on how clever that word is. Some say that the word cannot have been used before (never, ever) in any other double dactyl. Here's a wonderful example by poet George Starbuck (whose work I take a look at in the August issue of Numero Cinq. ) Notice that Starbuck, not to be outdone by anyone in terms of technical control, comes up with two six-syllable words in that second stanza:

Higgledy piggledy
Fifty Columbuses,
Fifty times richer in
Trinkets and beads

Couldn’t provision the
Quinquecentennial
Memorabilia
Business’s needs.

Here is one of Hollander's own; it's typical of his light-verse with a dark twist: 

Higgeldy, piggeldy,

Anna Karenina

Went off her feed and just

Couldn't relax.

Then, quite ignoring the

Unsuitability,

Threw in the sponge and was

Scraped off the tracks.

And here is one where he actually wrote a double dactyl about how to write double dactls:

Self Reference 

Starting with nonsense words:
  ("Higgeldy-piggeldy"),
  then comes a name (making
  line number two);
Somewhere along in the 
  terminal quatrain, a
  didaktyliaios
  word and we're through. 

Hecht and Hollander published a whole book of these silly and delightful poems titled Jiggery Pokery, which inspired a whole generation of MFA students with equally silly souls (I include myself) to try their hand at them. I challenge readers of The Drift Record to write a double dactyl and leave it in the comments - in honor of John Hollander! Come on! Do it! Doesn't have to be about John Hollander or about anything specific to poetry - just a double dactyl about anyone (as long as that someone's name is dactylic!)

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The Poetry Friday round-up is being hosted this week by Betsy at I Think in Poems. Head over there to see what other people have posted.

Poetry Friday: "First Crushes" and the Door to Wonder

Holland Cotter, art critic at The New York Times, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, writes about his love of recited poetry in the wonderful new series "First Crush":

Here's a preview of the essay, titled "Finding Poetry on the Page and, Later, on the Canvas":

I was lucky to come from a family of reciters and readers. My great-great-aunt Helen, probably born a decade or so after the Civil War, was in her late 70s, maybe 80s, when I was 8 or 9. She came from a poetry-memorizing Victorian culture and knew long passages of Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King” and Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha” by heart. Whenever I visited, I asked her to “do ‘Hiawatha.’ ” To this day, I can still hear the rhythms and sounds of her delivery, particularly the way she enunciated Longfellow’s “Indian” names. They conjured up miraculous visual images, natural and supernatural: a woman descends from the moon to earth; a rainbow turns into a field of flowers; birds and forest animals speak. 

I love to see how a love of words - especially poetry - spreads to a love of all kinds of creative activities. Language is a door to wonder in general, isn't it?  

 
Click here to read Cotter's short and lovely essay. 

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Poetry Friday today is being hosted by Lisa over at Steps and Staircases (on Tumblr.) Head over there for links to what other people have posted.