The Bells

 

The Bells

 

Church bells are pealing a cadence at dawn

Voicing their sorrow for souls who have gone

Sounding their sadness at gray break of day

Grieving the shades -- I hear them that way.

 

The bells of the village are singing with joy

Chiming in pleasure, such chords they employ!

What happy occurrence this splendor to cause?

Ceasing my reading, I ponder with pause.

 

The bells so familiar an anthem they sound

Hope for the world, could they have found?

Who could be pulling the ropes so intent?

Sipping my coffee my doubts I relent.

 

No comfort the bells a clatter they make

One can’t but shudder, not music but ache

Signaling trouble, signaling pain

A dreadful foreboding of nothing to gain.

 

The bells once familiar fell silent this year

Thinking it over the message seems clear

Defilement of nature, men do as they may

But the God of Spinoza will have the last say.

 

 

© 2024 Fowler W Martin

An Ode to U.S. Post-Election Developments

 

If you lie, make it bold
Those who like it will behold
Their savior now a martyr made
To arms they call, a new crusade

He incites, they soon comply
On the hill, their flags do fly
Doors are breached, the sanctum stormed
Desecration of the norm

One Way To Look at Poetry -- and the Lyrics for an Aria

 The Nov. 11, 2020 New York Times has a review of "African American Poetry," as compiled by Kevin Young, currently poetry editor at The New Yorker and soon to become director of the Smithsonian's African American Museum in Washington D.C.  At present, Young also heads the New York Public Library's research center on Black culture.

Young's new anthology, at about 1,110 pages, is a roundup of poetry by African Americans over the past 250 years and, among other things, attempts to save some Black poets from obscurity.

The Times review, by Parul Sehgal, was very positive. Among other things, he said, it reads like a form of history.

What jumped out at me, however, was what might be viewed as a definition of poetry by Sehgal. To wit: "Whatever the style, whatever the shape of the vessel, the particular holding power of the poem is clear. More efficiently than almost any other form, a poem can convey a feeling of simultaneity; the past can saturate the present, the future can rear up behind us, a mood can tip between lament and praise song."

I am far from an expert on poetry -- in fact quite the reverse -- but that definition rang some bells for me because I have been attempting to write the libretto for an operetta that would be done in a neo-Baroque style. Among other things, that involves writing lyrics, generally in rhyme, for individual songs, or arias. This is in contrast to most contemporary operas which generally employ continuous music with voices coming in and out, albeit sometimes for extended periods, but generally not singing anything that can stand alone as "a song."

In the Baroque style, which emphasizes the vocal capabilities of singers first and foremost, the lyrics need to be kept very short. That means packing as much meaning or as many ideas as possible into very few words to achieve a result somewhat similar to that described by Shegal above.

Readers interested in the operetta project can check out this page on my author's website.

Quote of the Day: On The Rewards of Writing

"If you’re going to write, you’re going to have to find a reason to do it that has nothing to do with money or recognition or award."

That, says poet Hala Alyan in a Literary Hub article, is because publishers mostly say "no."

I also liked the following from the same article:

"We are living in an age of borders, a moment when people will either cling to those borders or try to dismantle them. A time when language matters more than ever, when words can be used to stoke or resist fear, as people try to criminalize words like 'immigrant' and 'trans' and 'Black.' Reclaim language. Allow writing to transcend those borders."

I don't agree with President Trump on much, but I do agree that political correctness has gone too far.

A Mother's Judgement

When it comes to assessing success or failure in life, it's interesting how often individuals measure themselves against what their mothers believe -- even while often rebelling against them.

This is probably particularly true in cultures that are very family-focused, such that of the Chinese.

An example can be seen in a poem written by Chinese-American poet Chen Chen who is gay while his brothers apparently are not.

"I am a gay sipper [a cautious person], & my mother has placed what's left of her hopes on my brothers," says one line of Chen's poem "Self-Portrait as So Much Potential."

"Beautiful sons," the poem ends, referring to all but the poet himself.

By clicking on the name of the poem above, you can read the entire short piece as printed in a recent edition of the New York Times Sunday magazine.

I recommend it.

The Limitless Maintained in Experience of Momentary Light

The title of this post is the last stanza of a short poem on the topic of "Epiphany" by William Curtis.

The word, in its most primary sense, refers to a sudden manifestation of the divine. In that context, the most famous epiphany is perhaps that of St. Paul (then known as Saul) when, on the road to Damascus, he saw the figure of the risen Jesus and became a convert to Christianity.

But as we now know it, an epiphany can be a sudden insight into almost anything. It doesn't have to be religious in nature.

Eliot & Barnes: Why The Past Belongs In What's New

In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot famously argued that great poets are distinguished not by the degree to which their work differs from the past, but rather by the manner in which they incorporate and acknowledge prior achievements.

It is a prejudice of critics that they search for those aspects of a poet’s work that least resembles the work of other writers, and pretend to find therein the essence of the poet and that which readers can most enjoy, Eliot said. “Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously,” he continued.

Quote of the Day: Never About One Thing

"A poem is never about one thing. .. . You want it to be as complicated as your feelings."

That from an article in the March 29 issue of the "New York Times Magazine," entitled "Galaxies Inside His Head" and subtitled "Race and Identity in the Poems of Terrance Hayes."

What Hayes appears to be suggesting is that he packs his poetry with multiple issues – and perhaps not in a linear fashion.

Like a good wine, complexity is critical.

That's one way of looking at the notion of "more than one thing."

But there is an alternative. Poems, and arguably stories, are chiefly about more than one thing because readers interpret the same work differently and not because of anything the author says.