"SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS OF POETRY IN ENGLISH" - John Leonard [ed] (Aust 1994)
I've come to the conclusion that at least half of the known world exists between the covers of books, and while this one (roughly the size and weight of your average breeze block) journeys backwards in Time (1991 to the 1300s), from the Now that we know through those other Times that we don't know, from Les Murray and Seamus Heaney to Chaucer and Langland. (But I have to add there's nothing of yours and nothing of mine in it and without them no version of the world would be complete, eh).
This is the third of my "chuck-out" OpShop freebies, (why oh why do people throw out such treasure?), and will be a keeper, as surely no-one has ever read it from end to end, but will go on picking it over., a real browser. It's one of those. It's going up onto my shelves. So I can take it down every so often when I need to re-visit the other half of the world. Even if it is incomplete.
It contains about 700 poems by 150 people, includes all of the "greats", plus heaps that should've been, and heaps that are (for me) completely unreadable. Especially before 1800. 1850. 1880! And I have to publicly own up to why that is. And okay, you may disagree, but we each like what we like. Especially when it comes to poetry.
I approach reading poetry the same way I approach all creative writing. A novel has to suck me in by page six, a short story by paragraph two, and a piece of poetry by line four. If it doesn't, I move on.
First, I can't get into stuff that's self-consciously pretentious, those pieces that are simply chopped up into 3-liners or 4-liners to look like "poetry", and often when they are actually really great prose. (Check the piece on Jeff Guess posted 8th April below). Give it away guys, it's irritating and a waste of your talent. Find a more natural rhythm to suit the content. Then there's the old-fashioned, strict-metre, twisted-syntax, rhyme-at-any-cost stuff. This is a legitimate art form but so little of it works well. They're way too often simply exercises in being clever.
What else? I found that much of the 1800s pieces, so much of it by the "greats", were just public competitions of the day in describing Nature. Geez they wuz boring fellas. The Romance crap from the 1700s - ohmygod - indigestible. Then there's all that Religion wallop back in the 1500s-1600s, compounded by being in Old English. And the literary lengths some went to! - 43 verses and they still couldn't find what they were trying to say. Spenser's "Faerie Queen" (c1590) goes to 36,000 lines, but the longest poem ever written in English is 131,000 lines, and that was in the early 1800s.
So, what can I say? Walt Whitman (1819-1892) showed us the way to write poetry in so-called "free verse", to break away from the rule-driven poetic conventions of the past, and (okay, as I see it) capture in words the inner workings of your body mind and soul in the dealings you have with the world as you find it - the whole funny, sad, brutal, loving, hating, creating, destroying, shitty, uplifting - experience.
As I ploughed through this tome, I tagged everything that caught my eye. I'll put bits of these up in "Pandoras Box", give you a chance to bucket my opinions. Ah, I do so love this job!
Cheers....
Trev
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