Meditations At Keyboard
All the new poetry is unrhymed.
In this it does not resemble the old poetry.
The idea, for example, that meter and scheme
illuminate the clarity of an idea. That clowning
with words would peck and probe the dead irrelevance
of the Sonnet, by its rhyme scheme
some tragic fallen echo of a first word
that is divided. Or lightly the notion that
because there is in this word no one sound
to which the thumb-push of a Blackberry corresponds,
a word is partly homophone to what it rhymes.
We scanned the verses late last night and in the rhyme
of the Villanelle, there was anachronism, in the Sestina a meter
most questing. After a while I understood that
rhyming this way, everything constructs: aesthetics,
wine, this keyboard, a woman and I. There was a poem
I loved to hear and I remember how, hearing
in the light rhythms a heartbeat sometimes,
I felt a gentle pleasure in its presence
like a yearning for alliteration, for my childhood rhymes
with their iambs, now silly sing-song in a modern age,
a muddy place for thinking where I still wish
for formal structure. It hardly exists with poems.
Long forms, say, desiring to fill a page
or cross distances. It must not be the same to you.
But I remember so much, the way hands turned pages,
the things before my eyes, paper in hand, words,
lost dreams. There are moments when the poem is as luminous
as electrons, days that are the good words continuing.
Such tender words, too much form and scheme
to be sent from your Blackberry, Blackberry, Blackberry.
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My poem is an obvious parody of MEDITATIONS AT LAGUNITAS, by Robert Hass, which I cannot remember seeing before today. (But which seems somehow hauntingly familiar.)
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/haas/online.htm
But, inspiration is where you find it. And I found it here.
http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2008/08/24/meditations-at-whole-foods/
