[Tim Murphy]

I think I'd say "embodies love." The meter is very well handled until the last stanza, where you've a tet and a di. I do think it is too much ado about too little and could profit by being substantially shortened.

[Terese Coe]

This is especially good, Robt:

and yet I have not moved

silent through the trees
or stillness of the air,
except to touch the pond.
What place is there to turn?
What hope of breaking free
from circle of the year,
except it turns with me?

["Circling entranced": two beats, no? Unless you say "CIRcle-ING"?]



[This message has been edited by Terese Coe (edited August 07, 2004).]

[peter richards]

From the lazy corner, but really, get a grip:


<FONT >The Fiddler of Dooney</FONT s>
By William Butler Yeats



<u>The Fiddler of Dooney</u>


WHEN I play on my fiddle in Dooney,

Folk dance like a wave of the sea;

My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,

My brother in Moharabuiee.




I passed my brother and cousin:

They read in their books of prayer;

I read in my book of songs

I bought at the Sligo fair.




When we come at the end of time,

To Peter sitting in state,

He will smile on the three old spirits,

But call me first through the gate;




For the good are always the merry,

Save by an evil chance,

And the merry love the fiddle

And the merry love to dance:




And when the folk there spy me,

They will all come up to me,

With ‘Here is the fiddler of Dooney!’

And dance like a wave of the sea.


p

[Robert E. Jordan]

Poor Dead Fred

He often wished he were dead,
like rancid meat, colored red,
looking like it was freshly bled.

To family dear he would be fed;
sitting in tummies like sodden lead
he'd cause discomfort in their bed.

From their silliness he had fled
feeling he was much better bred
not caring for the life he led.

A new path he sought to tread,
but there lingered in his head
an idea for revenge instead.

Poor old misanthropic Fred,
he had poisoned them all it's said;
they strapped him to the gurney bed.

Naughty naughty bad bad Fred.

[Tim Murphy]

Robert Jordan, Most of these lines are tets rather than trimeter. The unsurety of the rhythm and the relentless monorhymes combine to make it singularly unimpressive.

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Perhaps this is the right place for me to Ask the Poet Lariat (and any others who might have an opinion) about a poem I'm currently slaving over. If we had an "Embryonic Board," I might post it there; but we don't.

I've been working on a poem intending for it to be free verse, but with every revision, the lines are falling more and more into a fairly accentual trimeter. I'm not using rhyme, nor an alliterative pattern. I'm at the stage of needing to narrow down my intent for the lines, because late in the poem some very troublesome lines are not limited to three stresses, and I wonder if I should focus on making them so or allow the original f.v. intention to triumph. I'm caught between two possibilities, because I could also "open up" the first half of the poem; right now, the poem is made quite rough by the imbalance, I think.

I know that some f.v. skirts the edge of being metrical, often in an accentual sense. My question:

<dir>Is a non-rhyming, non-alliterative, accentual trimeter possible/worthwhile; i.e., is a kind of "blank" tri-meter worth attempting?</dir>

Looking over my revisions, I see I've been using phrasing w/ the help of fairly syntactical line breaks to create "turns" in the poem; I'm not talking of breaking only to create three stresses per line, at odd enjambments.

[Janet Kenny]

Great Mezey poem. Not just Robinson but a whisper of Auden?

NO MORE


Once they have closed the door,
That is the final day
And time will be no more.

Forget "the other shore"—
No earth, no sea, no way
Once they have closed the door,

No after, no before,
Nothing for clocks to say,
For time will be no more—

Vain the discarded core,
Useless the feet of clay
Once they have closed the door.

For soldier, queen and whore,
All persons of the play,
Time will be no more.

No time now to restore
This burden, this cliché.
Soon they will close the door
And time will be no more.

Look what happened when I copied. Sigh.
Janet

[Svein Olav Nyberg]

Tried my hand at trimeter last night. Phew! That is really not a game for beginners! My respect for those who excel in this meter is tripled. Free Verse might be playing tennis with the net down. Trimeter is like playing tennis where the net is replaced with a solid wall with 10 small holes in it. In dimeter, I wager, 9 of the holes have been taken away. None the less, or maybe because of this ... I am interested in the challenge. As president Kennedy said about choosing to go to the moon.

Anyway, my first attempt. From the ashes of this one will bloom the successes of tomorrow. I hope.


The miracle

An ordinary death
was about to become mine.
I prayed for a miracle
-a command by divine breath-
a sig to appear i my shrine.
Confined to my own skull

I sagely asked and returned
the obvious Q&A's.
The miracle? More days!
No horn of plenty, walking
on water, learning to fly.
So many years burned,
waiting for and talking
about miracles, but I
discovered far too late:
The miracle is the life
we're given and create.

I prayed for one more chance
to appreciate that which I got,
and promised not to squander
life again. I ponder
as I wait for that chance: Just what
am I doing now, perchance,
with the little I have left?


Compare this to original story idea: End of life. Discovering that the biggest miracle of all is life itself; no miracle can be the miracle of life. Yet, "I" have spent all of life looking for other miracles. Now "I" pray for a miracle of pro-longing life. Waits for the miracle, and - forgets to focus on the life "I" still has left, thus squandering even it. Even my poor rhyming has dragged me around.

------------------
Svein Olav (The poet formerly known as Solan )



[This message has been edited by Svein Olav Nyberg (edited April 07, 2005).]