BELOW THE SPRUCE

I just noticed that Contemporary Verse 2 has updated their website to include the Winter 2008 issue, which focuses on various ways the body manifests itself in poetry. This is also the issue that contains two of my poems. The kind people at CV2 were kind enough to post a link to one of the two, entitled “Driving The 330 From Gander”, on their website. If you feel so inclinded, you can check it out here. There are some wonderful poets featured in this issue as well, so there’s no shortage of good reading and you really should take a look. You know you want to….

The Rush To Here
George Murray
Nightwood Editions, 2007
ISBN: 978-0889712294

The Rush to Here (2007 Nightwood Editions)

At some point in their writing careers, most poets will try their hand at a sonnet or two. There’s almost a sense that in order to be a successful poet one must prove an ability to write a successful sonnet. This is probably a burden self-imposed upon poets due to the enormous weight of The Tradition. For centuries the sonnet has been one of the most standard forms of poetry in English and many masters have developed and added to the form over the years (think of Shakespeare, Donne, Hopkins, Rossetti, St. Vincent Millay, and Cummings to name a few), leaving writers of today with a wealth of building blocks from which to construct their own contributions.

In Murray’s The Rush To Here (Nightwood Editions, 2007), the sonnet, for the most part, appears in a traditional form. It varies between couplet, triplet, and quatrain stanzas and still retains the octave, volta, and sestet components in order to provide a kind of problem-solution or question-answer form. The poems tend to work in a free verse style, but maintain traditional line lengths. Where Murray really begins to depart from tradition, or rather alter tradition, is in his use of rhyme.

As many before him, Murray uses standard rhyme schemes for his sonnets, but the rhymes themselves take on a different element. Traditional rhyme uses sound echoes to signify a line or stanza’s end and, therefore, a change in poetic unit or stitch. Murray uses thought-rhymes (his term). Instead of a word sonically matching with another at the end of a line we find meanings rhyming with meanings. This connotation-link between lines and images at once solidifies a unity in each stanza, but also promotes a strong coherence throughout each poem, both elements very much on the minds of serious poets.

The Dear Water Sings

The weather turns chill, my angry new love,
but there’s a trickle under the snow,
our world shrinking even as it grows. The dear
water sings, Cold, come and go; Come and go, cold.

Let your shoulders down against the wind,
unbuckle your face like a belt after
a holiday dinner, let your arms untwist.
Base your pleasure on what you feel, right now.

My mouth the harp it was always meant to be,
tongue a strong finger plucking the startled air.
She has starved herself down to the ghost,
down to her own disgust, down to the gasp.

Croon even when the air is sucked from your lungs.
Just be ready to speak, and song will come of breath.

This poem well displays the rhyme form and the skill of the crafter. Some rhymes are concrete and work on the physical level (snow/cold, lungs/breath), but we also find more abstract combinations (love/dear, after/right now, be/ghost). This type of writing restriction is one that gives the poet a focus, that narrow vision that often inspires and pushes creativity. It also leaves the poet with more options than a traditional sound rhyme, to which such devices as slant rhyme have tried to bring new breath and flexibility. This flexibility can be used to another advantage: the poet can use the word light with more than one connotation. It can be rhymed with dark to signify an abundance or lack of brightness; rhymed with dawn to signify a time of day; rhymed with heavy to signify weight (both literal and figural), etc. These are examples of some of the rhymes Murray employs throughout The Rush To Here, showing us that rhyme need not be as restricted as one might suppose.

In an age when writers often produce works in the style of their own mentors, merely continuing an already established tradition, George Murray has created something new for poetry that others can add to their repertoires. He has, in a sense, inked his own stamp on form, which, if nothing else, embues poetry with a little more life and opens up realms of creativity for prospective poets.

If you follow what I’ve been writing here over the past few months, you may remember that I mentioned I had

Image from http://www.globalforestscience.org

three sections of a longer poem entitled “Below the Spruce” published in The Society 2008 back in March. Any day now I will have three more sections from the same poem published in the newest issue of the

Newfoundland Quarterly. I happen to really love NQ with it’s articles of local interest and history, yet it has a wider appeal in readership as well. A good all round publication. So that makes two rejections and one acceptance in the past couple weeks. Not too bad.

The manuscript submissions are rather taxing in the patience department, due to the shear amount of time it takes to hear back from a publishing house. The months of waiting really take a lot out of you. You invest such an incredible amount of time into the writing of a manuscript and it’s easy to want a quick answer. Publishers do need to check you out, your writing and compare your writing to the stack of other manuscripts just waiting to be accepted. Wait for the rejections, submit elsewhere, move on.

As I may or may not have mentioned in an earlier entry, I’m getting married August 1st (Yay me!). There has been much planning and hard work put into the event thus far and I’m sure it will be wonderful.

One thing that my fiancee and I have decided to do is to place certain pertinent poetry quotes on each guest table as a way of commenting on the act of marriage and love in general. We also want to have readings of two poems instead of bible verses at the ceremony (though raised in protestant faiths, neither my fiancee or I have a desire to involve God, god, or g-d in the wedding). Christian belief doesn’t really figure into our lives much, if at all, myself ascribing to a more personal/individual spiritual system. Having read quite a bit of poetry we both figure choosing selections wouldn’t be the hard part, but when it comes down to it choosing which quotations to use aren’t always the easiest.

One that we are both sure of is “i carry your heart with me” by E. E. Cummings. This poem will be one of the two read at the ceremony, but we also want to include a selection from it on one of the tables. I like the first three lines of “On the Breakwater” by Carl Sandburg as well. I’ve chosen “Is It For Now Or For Always” by Philip Larkin. This is a wonderful poem. In particular the last stanza:

Is it for now or for always,
The world hangs on a stalk?
Is it a trick or a trysting-place,
The woods we have found to walk?

Is it a mirage or miracle,
Your lips that lift at mine:
And the suns like a juggler’s juggling-balls,
Are they a sham or a sign?

Shine out, my sudden angel,
Break fear with breast and brow,
I take you now and for always,
For always is always now.

I’m considering this one as one of the two readings as well. So far we’ve also looked at poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Pablo Neruda. Our aim is to decide on the poems and get to work on organizing a display for them as soon as possible. We’ll see where this goes.