[A. E. Stallings]

Just curious how folks here will react to these poems.

The first, a supple free verse:

The Pied Piper

Under the day's crust a half-eaten child
And further sores which eyesight shall reveal
And they live. But what of dark elders
Whose touch at nightfall must now be
To keep their promise? Misery
Starches the host's one bed, his hand
Falls like an axe on her curls:
"Come in, come in! Better that the winter
Blaze unseen, than we two sleep apart!"

Who in old age will often part
From single sleep at the murmur
Of acerb revels under the hill;
Whose children couple as the earth crumbles
In vanity forever going down
A sunlit road, for his love was strongest
Who never loved them at all, and his notes
Most civil, laughing not to return.

[A. E. Stallings]

This, a triple-rhythm tetrameter sestina:

The Painter

Sitting between the sea and the buildings
He enjoyed painting the sea's portrait.
But just as children imagine a prayer
Is merely silence, he expected his subject
To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,
Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.

So there was never any paint on his canvas
Until the people who lived in the buildings
Put him to work: "Try using the brush
As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait,
Something less angry and large, and more subject
To a painter's moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer."

How could he explain to them his prayer
That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?
He chose his wife for a new subject,
Making her vast, like ruined buildings,
As if, forgetting itself, the portrait
Had expressed itself without a brush.

Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush
In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer:
"My soul, when I paint this next portrait
Let it be you who wrecks the canvas."
The news spead like wildfire through the buildings:
He had gone back to the sea for his subject.

Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
Too exhausted even to lift his brush,
He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings
To malicious mirth: "We haven't a prayer
Now, of putting ourselves on canvas,
Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!"

Others declared it a self-portrait.
Finally all indications of a subject
Began to fade, leaving the canvas
Perfectly white. He put down the brush.
At once a howl, that was also a prayer,
Arose from the overcrowded buildlings.

They tossed, him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings;
And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush
As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.

[A. E. Stallings]

And this, a short lyric about trees, gracefully heterometric, with full and slant rimes:

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defence.

[Roger Slater]

I like these very much, particularly the third one, which has long been a favorite of mine. I won't identify who wrote these, in case Alicia withheld that information for a reason, except to note that they were all written by the same poet (I'm pretty sure) who has had a long and distinguished career, though he is generally not championed by the formalist community.

This is a good idea, posting poems without saying who wrote them. Many will already know, but some will be surprised.

[A. E. Stallings]

Roger,

Thanks for your comments, and your discretion. "Many will already know, but some will be surprised" strikes me as a rather handsome alexandrine in search of a poem.

Yes, I had rather hoped to stir up a controversy. But am afraid this is losing out to the very popular Classic Jokes thread, alas.

OK. One more try. Another (yes, by the same author). Here, a supple, mostly iambic heterometricity, often inclining to IP, in unrimed quatrains.

Song

The song tells us of our old way of living,
Of life in former times. Fragrance of florals,
How things merely ended when they ended,
Of beginning again into a sigh. Later

Some movement is reversed and the urgent masks
Speed toward a totally unexpected end
LIke clocks out of control. Is this the gesture
That was meant, long ago, the curving in

Of frustrated denials, like jungle foliage
And the simplicity of the ending all to be let go
In quick, suffocating sweetness? The day
Puts toward a nothingness of sky

Its face of rusticated brick. Sooner or later,
The cars lament, the whole business will be hurled down.
Meanwhile we sit, scarcely daring to speak,
To breathe, as though this closeness cost us life.

The pretensions of a past will some day
Make it over into progress, a growing up,
As beautiful as a new history book
With uncut pages, unseen illustrations,

And the purpose of the many stops and starts will be made clear:
Backing into the old affair of not wanting to grow
Into night, which becomes a house, a parting of ways
Taking us far into sleep. A dumb love.

[Robt_Ward]

Personally, I've always thought the man's a master. Lives right on the edge of formal, rarely entirely free. Got his own voice, I'd assume many will recognize it even in these poems.

But discretion reigns...

I love the sestina, always have. It maybe the least "sestina-ish" of any I have ever read. It seems so natural as it stands.

I wasn't familiar with the last poem, but it's lovely. I just adore the music this man makes.

(robt)

[hector]

I don't recall coming across these poems before, so I don't know the poet: I liked the sestina and the trees poem best, but I find it difficult to read or judge poems on screen. When was the trees poem written (tell when the discussion is near its end)? It bears a resemblance to Larkin's 'The trees are coming into leaf' but perhaps all poets say the same things about trees. One reason I joined the list was to find other poets : Richard Francis so far and now this one.

[Tim Murphy]

Hector, That's Robert Francis. I don't know who this is. The sestina is very fine, although the last line is a metrical disaster. I also think the fourth poem AES posted is quite good. The other two I care for not at all.

[Paul Lake]

This is just a guess, since I don't recognize, the poems, but I'd say it's a New York school poet--Koch, O'Hara, or most likely Ashbery.

The sestina's not bad (Ashbery once remarked that writing a sestina was as easy as peddling a bike down hill), but its theme makes me think of how much better Stevens' " The Man With the Blue Guitar" is.

The last of the poems, about the trees, sounds the best and has some good turns of phrase, but generally, I find the breezy style and rhythms of all the poems somewhat annoying and off-putting--the same emotion I feel on the rare occasions when I read something by Ashbery. The poems feel like some sort of intellectual game in which the poet is not emotionally invested. They're all bit too coy and self-satisfied for my taste.

So who's the author?

Paul Lake

[ChrisW]

I recognized the sestina as Ashbery. Paul's reaction is a more articulate version of what I would say. Ashbery never seems to grab me -- maybe it just goes over my head.