Robert, this was an excellent choice and it suggests answers to many questions I have had regarding the newest books by yourself, Jorie Graham, and C.D. Wright. Hardy's poem is, as you suggest, a poem of transition, as much of poetry is and has always been. In these recent books there has been the assertion (either implicit or overt) that the uses of poetry as we know it are in flux and endangered. There have been moments of doubt expressed, either subtly or starkly, about the meaning of the art--from its utilitarian aspects in your poems of "First Things to Hand", to Graham's poems of dramatic Shakesperean collapse, to Wright's poems of displacement and confusion.

In light of that, the Hardy poem sent me searching in my own mind for poems of transition; from the "Dark Riders" and "War is Kind" by Stephen Crane, to Dylan Thomas' "Lament", to Yeat's "Circus Animal's Desertion". All of these poems, and so much of poetry, locate fear and despair in ourselves and seek hope and understanding in those things that are least known to us in an easily articulable form. Poetry is, as Herodotus says, "Language that walks about the room"--in that way seeking and relating transitions that challenge our lives, livelihoods, and existence.

The discussion in the threads of the roots of rhyme seems particularly interesting in this regard. The poet Franz Wright referred last year in a talk to a medieval German monk (the name now lost to me), who proposed that the words of the New Testament which are truly those of Jesus are those which rhyme in Aramaic. In the years after the genocidal destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, the words and sayings of prophets would have been carried most frequently in the heads of refugees fleeing the onslaught, and rhyme would have been the most melodic and powerful way to remember the words of social cohesion. This notion gets at the heart of poetry's unshakable role in human existence, and the powerful resonance, the "Deep Song", of this poem in a time of such symbolic (and yet terrifyingly nebulous) transition for us all.

laurencegreen:

Robert, this was an excellent choice and it suggests answers to many questions I have had regarding the newest books by yourself, Jorie Graham, and C.D. Wright. Hardy's poem is, as you suggest, a poem of transition, as much of poetry is and has always been. In these recent books there has been the assertion (either implicit or overt) that the uses of poetry as we know it are in flux and endangered. There have been moments of doubt expressed, either subtly or starkly, about the meaning of the art--from its utilitarian aspects in your poems of "First Things to Hand", to Graham's poems of dramatic Shakesperean collapse, to Wright's poems of displacement and confusion.

In light of that, the Hardy poem sent me searching in my own mind for poems of transition; from the "Dark Riders" and "War is Kind" by Stephen Crane, to Dylan Thomas' "Lament", to Yeat's "Circus Animal's Desertion". All of these poems, and so much of poetry, locate fear and despair in ourselves and seek hope and understanding in those things that are least known to us in an easily articulable form. Poetry is, as Herodotus says, "Language that walks about the room"--in that way seeking and relating transitions that challenge our lives, livelihoods, and existence.

The discussion in the threads of the roots of rhyme seems particularly interesting in this regard. The poet Franz Wright referred last year in a talk to a medieval German monk (the name now lost to me), who proposed that the words of the New Testament which are truly those of Jesus are those which rhyme in Aramaic. In the years after the genocidal destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, the words and sayings of prophets would have been carried most frequently in the heads of refugees fleeing the onslaught, and rhyme would have been the most melodic and powerful way to remember the words of social cohesion. This notion gets at the heart of poetry's unshakable role in human existence, and the powerful resonance, the "Deep Song", of this poem in a time of such symbolic (and yet terrifyingly nebulous) transition for us all.

Laurencegreen, what you say here has so many implications, is so related to some of my own recent musings, that I have felt shy or unable to respond.

I think you are right that the "strings of broken lyres," an elegiac questioning of the fate or meaning or fragility of art has been a traditional theme of art. It's in classic poetry, in the old Anglo-Saxon poetry and may be part of our nature as an animal dependent on cross-generational memory: many of my most important thoughts, certainly most of my most crucial knowledge, comes from generations before me, and my life's project is largely to preserve, cultivate and pass on some of that for those to come. (I suddenly recall a poem of David Gewanter's about his barber grandfather, after his death his voice coming out of a tape recorder saying over and over-- comically and movingly-- something like "Hello? Hello? This is grandpa-- hello?" And I guess the First Things to Hand sequence you refer to is in part about how some grandpa or grandma or other-- a large consort of them, many convoys of them-- is there, nearly audible, in every thing we touch or think of.

I'll mention a memorable conversation I had with a Palestinian poet who said he thought the Jews had survived as a people for so many centuries because they made sacred, memorable art out of stories (eg Noah) shared by many other, now extinct peoples. He said he thought that the success of Islam grew from the fact that Mohammed was a poet, and composed the Koran in verse.