Milestones
{An Umbrella Invitational}


Philip Dacey’s

nine full-length books include The New York Postcard Sonnets: A Midwesterner Moves to Manhattan (Rain Mountain Press, 2007) and The Mystery of Max Schmitt: Poems on the Life and Work of Thomas Eakins (Turning Point, 2004).

The most recent of his dozen chapbooks is Three Shades of Green: Poems of Fatherhood (Snark, 2006). He’s received three Pushcart Prizes, two NEA creative writing fellowships, and a Fulbright to Yugoslavia.


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Rondel

A beautiful snow falls on a bed,
Amazing the man and woman there.
It falls between and over them where
Just before they lay close and naked.

They wonder if anything they said
Or did called down so cold through the air
This beautiful snow onto their bed
To amaze any who would love there;

They wonder if snowmen can be wed,
And if white is what they'll always wear,
And if lovers should sing or shiver
As they watch fall the uninvited
And beautiful snow onto their bed.


Originally published in College English and in How I Escaped From the Labyrinth and other Poems (Carnegie-Mellon U. Press, 1977).

 

 

Artist’s Statement

I n 1975, I took my wife and two young sons from Minnesota, where I was teaching after having acquired my M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1970, to Spain, where I set up for myself a writing regimen focused on teaching myself about the traditional poetic forms. As much as I appreciated my time in Iowa City, I was struck by the fact that during my two-year tenure there, I received absolutely no instruction in traditional forms in any class. I decided early in the 70’s that if traditional form was good enough for the likes of moderns like Yeats and Frost, it surely ought to be good enough for me. So each morning during our six-month stay in Madrid and Altea, I studied and practiced traditional forms. “Rondel” was the first traditional form poem I completed.

I consider that poem a turning point because it solidified my commitment to the self-imposed regimen and led me to persist post-Spain as a practitioner of traditional forms. Upon returning to Minnesota, I remember someone saying to me, “Why don't poets write in rhyme and meter anymore?” My response was to conceive the anthology Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms, which, helped by David Jauss's co-editorship, demonstrated that such forms were alive and well in America, albeit shouldered out of the headlines by the promoters of free verse.

I have continued to write frequently, though not exclusively, in traditional forms. For example, most of the poems in my books about Gerard Manley Hopkins and Thomas Eakins employ traditional forms, and my most recent book, The New York Postcard Sonnets: A Midwesterner Moves to Manhattan (Rain Mountain Press, 2007) obviously continues what “Rondel” started.



 
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