Monday, January 02, 2006

Concerning Your Ribald Haiku

This sonnet thing was written around 5AM this morning in response to the following piece of verse:

Your face makes me sick.
When I see you, I vomit.
Die away from me.

It was posted on a message board I frequent. It was directed at me! And so, the stage was set for the second of what will hopefully become a tremendous series of light-hearted mockeries of Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud." The first such mockery can be found on my other blog (here, in fact). Though I prefer my first riff on "Wandered" to the following piece, I have every confidence that I can keep the practice up until such time as Wordsworth's violent, lathe-like spinning in his grave upsets the Earth's orbit and vaults us into the Sun.

Concerning Your Ribald Haiku

I wonder now at you, thou proud
And scornful son of turpitude,
Who hath through Asian verse allow'd
A mocking message, base and rude,
To dance upon the Internet
And other hateful rhymes beget.

What then, O bastard? Aye, what then?
A thousand sins could cleave a path
Throughout th'electric world of men
(So far untouch'd by Satan's wrath;
Where virtue shines in every code,
And vice nor evils find abode)!

At first, 'twill just a trickle be:
Within a blog, or forum post,
Some angsty, ribald poetry
Shall find an unsuspecting host.
But then shall come a limerick black,
And none will think to turn it back.

Nantucket's son hath doom'd us all!
Roses carnal; violets bruis'd!
Now gasp as Scansion's pillars fall!
Now shriek as Lady Rhyme's abus'd!
And thou, O D_____, will'd it through:
Pandora's Box in one Haiku.

==

The original version (that is, my first draft) was somewhat more specific to the situation. It also made reference to more Internet fads and the like (MySpace, "pwnd," etc.), but I felt that this all left it bereft of the timeless quality that is the mark of a good Wordsworth pastiche. Now, it should be understood that "pwnd" is too delightful a word not to find its way into my work at some point in the future (stand ready, also, for possible allusions to ZOMG and Leeroy Jenkins). I regret that I could not recall any poetic fads beyond Nantucket and Roses Are Red to lampoon at the end there, but I have attempted to cover this barrenness with appeals to form rather than fancy.

All in all, a pleasant distraction from a political debate that should never have descended to the level of malicious poetry.

¶ 2:57 AM

Comments:

Your New Year's Resolution involved ten points, as opposed to the usual one which I limit myself to. Moreover, they are quite comprehensive, involving your spiritual, physical, emotional and financial progress. I admire your ambition and wish you all the best on these.

Regarding your resolution to write a poem every day: Bravo! I think your programme rests on the realisation that the creative path rests not so much on whims of fancy, but on effort. This became clear to me when I tried taking up ink painting in Japan, and had to submit to a regimen of thousands of repetitive brush strokes; left to right, across the paper.
I failed in seeing this through... which is why I have but one resolution. I wish you more success.
Michaelk

# posted by

Anonymous : 6:06 AM

Thank you very much, Michael. In the long run, I hope this will finally open my eyes to just what poetry is and how it is properly made. I mean, I feel I already have something of a handle upon the idea, but I am looking to form a new literary theory of some sort. I would like to explain why one can compare The Rape of the Lock to Madame Bovary and be able to instantly spot which is the poem.

Now, I already *know* why this is, but apparently we aren't allowed to say that it's because poetry is metered and rhymes. So, it seems that I will have to discern some other distinction to bolster this.

Anyhow, I think we've had this talk before, so I won't go into too much detail. I'm sorry to hear that the brush strokes didn't work out, but I am pleased that you have only committed to one resolution. There's a certain high pinnacle type symbolism to it that is quite fitting in Christendom.

Best of luck in the New Year, then, and for the upcoming Epiphany.

Also, I will fix this delayed action thing so it doesn't affect anonymous comments. I don't have the energy to moderate everything anyway.

# posted by

Nick Milne : 9:24 AM

I meant to put this particular comment on your Gentle Fuss site, and my other comment--now found there-- commending your verse, on this site.

Regarding meter and rhyme...indeed, we touched on that. And I don't see how your theory in developement will be able to ignore the wide-scale absence of the rhyme in Japanese and Chinese poetry. Meter, yes.
Michaelk

# posted by

Anonymous : 10:06 AM

I will ignore the wide-scale absence of rhyme in Japanese and Chinese poetry by ignoring Japanese and Chinese poetry. I am a very Western person.

Or - say - by allowing that poetry must have one or the other, but not necessarily both. Poetry that *does* boast both, however, is the most successful.

It needs some work, but my confidence is High.

# posted by

Nick Milne : 1:27 PM

Don't forget to read my main blog

What is this place?

This blog was started in an attempt to write a poem once a day, every day, for an entire year, but this expedition has met with failure! I gave up on transcribing the damn things in late January, and gave up writing them entirely around the end of February. It's not easy to do this at all. In fact, it is hard. I still feel as though I've learned something, anyway, so I'll keep what I did manage to do up here for now. I'll probably start posting stuff again irregularly when my workload decreases somewhat, which was really the reason for my problems in the first place. Who would have thought being in the third year of an honours BA would give you a lot of work to do?

Johnson on Poetry

"To a poet nothing can be useless. Whatever is beautiful and whatever is dreadful must be familiar to his imagination: he must be conversant with all that is awfully vast or elegantly little. The plants of the garden, the animals of the wood, the minerals of the earth, and meteors of the sky, must all concur to store his mind with inexhaustible variety: for every idea is useful for the enforcement or decoration of moral or religious truth; and he who knows most will have most power of diversifying his scenes, and of gratifying his reader with remote allusions and unexpected instruction."
- Imlac, in Rasselas

"The essence of verse is regularity, and its ornament is variety. To write verse is to dispose syllables and sounds harmonically by some known and settled rule -- a rule however lax enough to substitute similitude for identity, to admit change without breach of order, and to relieve the ear without disappointing it."
- From the biography of John Dryden in Lives of the Poets

Chesterton on Poetry

"Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. Artistic paternity is as wholesome as physical paternity. Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram.

Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin. Everywhere we see that men do not go mad by dreaming. Critics are much madder than poets. Homer is complete and calm enough; it is his critics who tear him into extravagant tatters. Shakespeare is quite himself; it is only some of his critics who have discovered that he was somebody else. And though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his own commentators. The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."
-From Orthodoxy

: Name: Nick Milne; Location: Canada

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