[A. E. Stallings]

(I hope I've made it clear that for me, Musing on Mastery need not be limited to the canonized, but is useful as a space to discuss the works of other poets.)

I realized the last few poets I posted, Dickinson, Heaney, Owen, all share a love for slant rime of one variety or another. This is one of my favorite contemporary sonnets, and I think it exploits slant rime beautifully. There are so many things "balanced" or "balancing" in this poem--not only the teetering rimes that somehow become plumb at the end, but the two points of view, Diverne's double life, the elegant diction of narration versus the colloquial chorus, etc.--a wonderful blend of form and function. It comes from a sequence of poems about Diverne, Pomp (her child by her white master), and Pomp's children, in the book/section "Homeplace" (from <u>The Fields of Praise</u>, Louisiana State University Press.) Poems in "Homeplace" range from sonnets, villanelles, ballades, quatrains to free verse.

Balance

He watch her like a coonhound watch a tree.
What might explain the metamorphosis
he underwent when she paraded by
with tea-cakes, in her fresh and shabby dress?
(As one would carry water from a well--
straight-backed, high-headed, like a diadem,
with careful grace so that no drop will spill--
she balanced, almost brimming, her one name.)

She think she something, stuck-up island bitch.
Chopping wood, hanging laundry on the line,
and tantalizingly within his reach,
she honed his body's yearning to a keen,
sharp point. And on that point she balanced life.
That hoe Diverne think she Marse Tyler's wife.


And another sonnet from the sequence, this in slant-rimed terza rima (Frost's "I have been one acquainted with the night" uses this variation--though with tight terza rima).

Chosen

Diverne wanted to die, that August night
his face hung over hers, a sweating moon.
She wished so hard, she killed part of her heart.

If she had died, her one begotten son,
her life's one light, would never have been born.
Pomp Atwood might have been another man:

born with a single race, another name.
Diverne might not have known the starburst joy
her son would give her. And the man who came

out of a twelve-room house and ran to her
close shack across three yards that night, to leap
onto her cornshuck pallet. Pomp was their

share of the future. And it wasn't rape.
In spite of her raw terror. And his whip.

[Victor Kulkosky]

Nelson's pieces posted here are good examples of how the oppressed can use the forms of the dominant culture for their own ends. White readers would probably never even hear such statements if they were made in rap songs or some kind of radical rant. Since Nelson has won admittance into the "New Formalist" ranks, a few of us can stand up and take notice. Here, Nelson makes use of the sonnet's tradition of intimate sentiments to present a relationship in which "intimacy" is ironic, to say the least. This is political poetry, but in a subtler and more effective sense: speaking out is itself a political act, and we may recall W.E.B. DuBois's declaration that all art is propaganda because it presents or represents particular world views. We're not, however, dealing with mere politics. By using and challenging the tradition, Nelson ultimately enriches it and honors it, but she could only do this after struggling with the tradition:

"I"m convinced our inclination to create race-, gender- and ethnic-specific literary enclaves is dangerous; that it disinvites us from community. The Angloamerican tradition belongs to all of us, or should. As does the community into which the tradition invites us. That means the metrical tradition, too." (Marilyn Nelson, "Owning the Masters," in "After New Formalism: Poets on Form, Narrative and Tradition," Annie Finch, Ed. Story Line Press.)

[A. E. Stallings]

I absolutely agree that the tradition belongs to ALL of us--that is surely the meaning of tradition. Indeed, arguments that free verse is somehow outside the tradition and thus better suited to the "marginalized" I find absolutely absurd. The sonnet, for instance, has long been a space in poetry where women (and "minorities") have excelled. And the invention of free verse is arguably more exclusively the product of Dead White Males than traditional forms. Not that that matters (except in debunking the argument). We are heir to all that is human; it is all ours to use.

[Tim Murphy]

Marilyn's father was a full bird colonel in the USAF, and her most recent teaching gig was a year of teaching poetry to cadets as West Point. So I hardly think she's a victim of racial, class, or gender opression. In fact her rather charmed progress up the ranks of poetry has been assisted by her race and gender. It's not pc for us white males to write formally, and consequently my most gifted brothers are consigned to backwater state schools and burdened with unconscionable teaching loads. Alicia, two excellent choices from an often uneven poet.

[Alan Sullivan]

Furthermore, Victor, the primary demographic for rap is suburban white kids. The real world is a lot more complex than the one you see through those polarized lenses.

A.S.

[Victor Kulkosky]

As far as I can tell, the rap that white kids listen to isn't of the protest variety, though since I don't listen to the stuff (except when it's forced on me by car stereos) I can't make any definitive statements about its content. In any case, I doubt that suburban white kids listening to rap say to themselves, "Hey, now I know where Black people are coming from, I've, like, felt the whole history of slavery and racism like I lived it myself, dude." Rap for those kids is an outfit they put on and take off when it suits them. My point was that by using the sonnet form and other Angloamerican poetic forms, Nelson and others reach an audience in the habit of reading things closely and, I would hope, expand our experience as well as the tradition. It's an act of reaching out, rather than preaching to the choir, and everybody benefits.

As to the polarization thing, I'm dedicated to de-polarizing the world. It's a mistake to attack poetry written in a certain style as if the poetry itself is the problem. (If I thought otherwise, I wouldn't be moving in a more formalist direction myself.) "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," doesn't oppress people; "Paradise Lost" never enslaved anybody. Poetry and all the other arts represent the best of any culture. What is oppressive is the imposition of a particular tradition as THE tradition, the best one, the only one worth paying attention to, and if you want full admission you have to do it our way. This has gone on and still goes on, and, I'll add, the West isn't the only perpetrator, just the biggest target and the one currently in the hot seat. To the West's credit, things are getting more eclectic, and Europe and the U.S. generally don't bash the skulls of their critics.

Tim -- I'm outside academia when it comes to poetry, being a journalism student. All I know is what I've read in essays by Dana Gioia and Bruce Bawer, and that situation is deplorable. Nelson's good fortune, doesn't, I believe, change the bigger picture. Just what the picture looks like still depends too much on one's social viewpoint (witness the startling polarization of opinion in the OJ Simpson case). What's needed, I suggest, is for everybody to see things through each other's eyes. Black people and women and various groups say gender and race and ethnicity are still problems; others insist those problems are history and don't want to hear any more about it. Nobody's really listening to anybody else -- just listening, not immediately taking a defensive posture. To get back to the poems that started this lively discussion, I see them as Nelson's attempt at just such a dialog, and her quote couldn't be clearer about NOT wanting polarization. Can we de-politicize, in the sense of moving away from us vs. them? This is the only planet we've got, so we're stuck with each other.
vk


------------------
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens." Baha'u'llah

[Tim Murphy]

I'm no academic, Victor. I'm a venture capitalist. As you're new to the site you may not know that Alan and I are gay and together for twenty-eight years. When we were coming out in the late sixties we were members of a far more oppressed minority than any which our fond friend Marilyn belongs to. I heard Bobby Seale and his Panther brethren preach death to the fags in terms far worse than those now uttered by Falwell et alia. But we are also staunch libertarians who believe only in individual, not group rights, and we deplore the culture of victimization that besets this self-pitying country of ours.

[Victor Kulkosky]

Thanks, Tim, for bringing a different perspective.

I'm afraid my little diatribe was a mistake. It wasn't well thought out and written when I was half asleep. Since it was a response to the Nelson poems posted, I talked about African Americans and women, not meaning to imply that weren't other groups who have been or are oppressed here or anywhere else by someone.

But it seems, "What we have here is failure to communicate." The reactions to my post seem to be peripheral to what I THOUGHT I was trying to say. Correct me if you see otherwise, but I don't recall saying anything about collective rights. I was trying to say something about dialog and inclusion, but apparently failed to get that across. In the future, I'll either edit my posts on controversial topics or simply save politically charged statements for other venues -- probably the latter, since my time is limited and I'm not temperamentally (sp.?) suited to heated discussions.

[nyctom]

I don't know Alicia--maybe it's me, but mixing "coonhound," dialogue right out of Alice Walker, "metamorphosis" and "diadem" in the same poem just felt too bizarre to me. I wish I could like these better than I do. I like the slant rhymes, but (alas) I don't like much else. That second poem didn't do a thing for me at all except make me shrug. I don't like it; I don't dislike it. I don't feel much of anything about it one way or the other.

And I am not going to even touch the other part of the discussion, except to say--even as a white, gay man from an intensely Irish Catholic family--I intensely dislike the "who's been more shit upon this Tuesday" game.

Ah well, you can't like everything.

nyctom

[Robert J. Clawson]

Tim, I don't think your comment on Marilyn's "rather charmed progress up the ranks of poetry" being "assisted by her race and gender" is fair. She earned the 1999 Poets' Prize, a judgement by her peers. Of the 20 poets judging The Fields of Praise, two are frequently favored here, Dana Gioia and R. S. Gwynn. She also spends more time on research than most poets. Her book on George Washington Carver is a gem.

Here's one from Homeplace.

Chopin

It's Sunday evening. Pomp holds the receipts
of all the colored families on the Hill
in his wide lap, and shows which white store cheats
these patrons, who can't read read a weekly bill.
His parlor's full of men holding their hats
and women who admire his girls' good hair.
Pomp warns them not to trust the Democrats,
controlling half of Hickman from his chair.
The varying degrees of cheating seen,
he nods toward the piano. Slender, tall,
a Fisk girl passing-white, almost nineteen,
his Blanche folds the piano's paisley shawl
and plays Chopin. And blessed are the meek
who have to buy in white men's stores next week.


Bob



[This message has been edited by Robert J. Clawson (edited October 21, 2001).]