--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I’m liking these bare ruined choirs that are being discussed here. Snodgrass must have been a wonderful teacher.
One of the things I’m taking away from these threads is how eccentricities of voice – due to time, place, personality and other factors – are essential elements of a poet’s music.
I wonder how much of any poem can be attributed to craft. For example, the slant rhymes and the metrical variation do give ‘My Papa’s Waltz’ a tipsy, waltzing feel, but I doubt it was plotted out that way in advance; my guess is it was a bit of luck that sprang from the glimmer of an idea or an inspired phrase or two, and was honed by sweat and skill. ‘Ruining’ a poem this way is very illuminating in that it tells you some of the reasons why it works: if you started from scratch with the ruined poems, though, you could see what is wrong with these alternate versions, but that wouldn’t allow you to create “My Papa’s Waltz” – which, by the way, is pinned to the corkboard in a friend’s office: as close to immortality as a poet could wish for. All the same, it’s probably a useful ear-sharpening exercise, to prepare for the day when lightning may strike you from out of the blue, like it did Herrick and Roethke on multiple occasions.
But maybe advocates of a plain style of poetry (and people who write mush-mouthed modern versions of the Bible) would gain as much or more from comparing these ruined poems with the successful originals.
Best,
Ed
[PS - originally mis-posted in the Ruining a Great Poem thread. Apologies.]
|