National Poetry Month #20

I remember sitting on my adolescent bed, listening to Whispering Chris Winter on ABC radio. Next to me was a cassette recorder and occasionally, as soon as Winter finished introducing a track, I'd press the Record button. Often there was an annoying overlap of announcer and song. As the song finished, I'd quickly press STOP, hoping that Whispering Chris would not leap in with a back-announcement before the final chord had faded. 

Plus ça change, as they say. Now, out walking and listening to poetry podcasts, I'll sometimes be struck by a poem, often read by its poet. Back home, if I can't track down the poem on the internet, I'd play-stop-play-stop-play the podcast, transcribing as best I can the poem.

With prose, that's not so difficult. With formal, rhyming verse, it's possible. Free verse, though, presents some difficulty. Here are a couple of poems that grabbed me, then I tried to grab them back, before I lost them altogether. They "feel" right, but who knows? I may have stuffed up the transcription utterly. Still, I love the poems.

 
Out Walking by Adam Zagajewski
 
Sometimes, out walking on a country road
or in a quiet green forest,
you hear scraps of voices.
Perhaps they’re calling you.
You don’t want to believe them.
You walk faster
but they catch up quickly,
like tamed animals.
You don’t want to believe them.
Then later, on a busy city street,
you’re sorry you didn’t listen
and you try to summon up the syllables,
the sounds
and the intervals between them.
But it’s too late now,
and you’ll never know
who was singing which song
and where it was drawing you.
 
(Transcribed from a podcast,

so the scansion is a mere guess.)

................................................................

Now, the power of music to bring memories to life.

Here, at least, I had the rhythm and rhyme as a guide.

The alliteration and sounds of the words, especially in the last 

five or six lines, make it impossible to read the poem quickly.

This is important, because reading it slowly gives immense 

power to the words and images.

Gypsy Tune by Gwen Harwood

Szabolcska once in Paris wept aloud

in public in the Grand

Café when a gypsy fiddler played

a folk song from his native land.

When memory seems a field of graves

and youth impossibly remote,

some sobbing air will breathe to life,

pulse beat by pulse beat, note by note,

landscapes and lovers, fields and friends,

long lost, long dead. Their features glow

with light so absolute you'd think

they could not join the shades below.

(Szabolcska was a Hungarian poet.

This was transcribed from a podcast,

so the line breaks, etc are mere guesses.)

................................................................

OK, for this who like the idea of rebellion against editors who would not publish female authors, here is Harwood's sonnet. (Read down the first letter in each line - it's an acrostic.)

Abelard to Eloisa

Far above memory’s landscape let the fears
unlatched from thundering valleys of your mind
carry their lightning. Stare the sun up. Find
kinetic heat to scorch your mist of tears.

All that vision limned by night appears
loose in dismembering air: think yourself blind.
Louder than death in headlines the unkind
elements hawk my passion: stop your ears.

Deny me now. Be Doubting Thomas. Thrust
into my side the finger of your grief.
Tell me I am an apparition frayed
out of the tattered winding-sheet of lust.
Recall no ghost of love. Let no belief
summon me, fleshed and bleeding, from the shade.