Comments by Distinguished Guest Amit Majmudar:
So nice to have my sense of the word NEWS refreshed and transfigured a little. With an election so close, "news" conjures lies and chatter, not capital-T Truth.
Traherne's musicality is very different from Merrill's (cf. the other poem posted today). This is poetry where the rhymes come very close together indeed, and are exact, and chime. Rhyme shapes and guides the lines; nothing seems catch-as-catch-can, nothing seems merely at the linebreak for a typographical coincidence of seeing a kindred word eight linebreaks up.
Traherne's embedding of verses inside a prose work is notable. Besides Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy and Dante's La Vita Nuova, the Persians did this a lot, Sa'adi most famously in his Bulistan (translated by none other than Richard Francis Burton). Also Kalidasa's Sanskrit plays (and Shakespeare's for that matter) mix prose and verse. We don't do this nearly enough. I've written a big Ramayana in that mixed form which will be released some time in the next couple years. I think the form would go far to create a more accessible and welcoming reading experience for verse-averse readers. And when there's prose to either side of your poem it pressures your poetry into a more vivid musicality.
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