- A matter of poetry<\/a>
- A sample poem<\/a><\/li>
- Whence the feature topic<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/li>
- Kalevala Form in a Nutshell<\/a>
- Verse Structure<\/a><\/li>
- Epic Irregularity<\/a><\/li>
- Stylistic Concerns<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/li>
- Monday: Coup de Main #64<\/a><\/li>
- Tuesday: Coup in Sunndi #37\u201339<\/a><\/li>
- State of the Productive Facilities<\/a><\/li><\/ul>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
A matter of poetry<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Poetry is one of these dying archaic art forms that are well on their way to being trampled over by the audiovisual cultural empires of the modern age. I enjoy occasionally dabbling in it, for all that I’m not aesthetically very in-tune with what passes for modern poetry. It could be the case that what I enjoy about poetry is in part about the historical distance between old poets and myself, and this is why modern poets generally fail to please me with their platitudes. Or maybe I just haven’t put in enough effort to understand modern poetry, who knows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Poetry is one of those things that aren’t part of the standard curriculum anymore, so perhaps a few words of introduction are of benefit to the unfamiliar reader. This is, as I understand it, poetry in a nutshell:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Stylized storytelling:<\/strong> Poetry used to be a major, prestigious storytelling vehicle back in the oldentimes; you’d put your most cherished stories into poetic form, like setting them in gold. For me it’s natural to have a major interest in the story arts involved in epic poetry, but this shouldn’t be taken to be the essential nature of the form; the story is, when all’s said and done, an arbitrary content choice for the poetic medium. You can have it or not. To appreciate poetry for its own essential self is to set aside the story for now and look deeper.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Combination of music and word:<\/strong> Poetry in its original cultural context is an oral tradition inextricably linked with the art of music. History of music is an important context for how poetry lived in a prehistorical society, as music itself simply isn’t that old when all’s said and done; what we think of as music today, with luxuries like harmonies and ensembles and artisan-crafted novel melodies is just a couple thousand years old. The common origin of poetry and music is in the joint presentation art of the poetic resitation, an art form that plays with rhythm, stress, tone of the word. The literary poem, read in silence, is a junior form of the medium, and arguably a failure as an independent artistic medium; poetry, if it is to be a thing of its own, ever returns to humans speaking to humans, with written text merely an aid to transmission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Play on words:<\/strong> Poetry is basically a synonym for “language game”, it’s just that conservative cultural esteem surrounding the poetic institution makes everything so stuffy that I absolutely won’t blame anybody for not bothering with poetry when you could instead be playing all kinds of living language games with your real friends. Still, that’s key to understanding what poets are even trying to do: they’re trying to be clever, rhetorically pleasant and impactful, playful with language. They’re trying to tickle the part of the human brain that so fluidly interprets and over-interprets human communication.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Poetic forms:<\/strong> The theory of poetry is just that, theory. A disservice is done to the medium when understanding of the theory is elevated as a precondition of understanding and appreciating poetry. If your poem requires your audience<\/em> to understand what iambic pentameter is to be properly appreciative of how well you’re filling the form, then you are an empty vessel devoid of the real art. A poetic form that doesn’t actually lead one to create comprehensible beauty is a dead historical curiousity, not something to be worshipped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The picture in words:<\/strong> The basic unit of poetry is arguably the poetic image formed into a verse. There are two component parts to this, the verbal image evoked by a choice of words, and the verse structure that constrains and limits the words and their ordering into a specific pattern. Poetic works consist of series of verses including a series of poetic images. A good poetic work has powerful images in pleasant verse phrasing. Far too often you are presented with poetry that has boring imagery (often conventional) in stilted, artificial verse phrasing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that’s the basic theory of what poetry is. Let’s go deeper:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A sample poem<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
I’ll come to why I’ve been reading this poem later, but for now, I’ll just copy Robert E. Howard’s poem Cimmeria<\/em> here in its entirety. It’s public domain as far as I know. Makes for a nice consideration piece for the English-language reader.<\/p>\n\n\n
\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\tThe Poem<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\tMeta<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\tCriticism<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\n\nCimmeria<\/strong>\nBy Robert E. Howard\n\nI remember\nThe dark woods, masking slopes of sombre hills;\nThe grey clouds' leaden everlasting arch;\nThe dusky streams that flowed without a sound,\nAnd the lone winds that whispered down the passes.\n<\/em>\nVista on vista marching, hills on hills,\nSlope beyond slope, each dark with sullen trees,\nOur gaunt land lay. So when a man climbed up\nA rugged peak and gazed, his shaded eye\nSaw but the endless vista - hill on hill,\nSlope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers.\n<\/em>\nIt was a gloomy land that seemed to hold\nAll winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun,\nWith bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds,\nAnd the dark woodlands brooding over all,\nNot even lightened by the rare dim sun\nWhich made squat shadows out of men; they called it\nCimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.\n<\/em>\nIt was so long ago and far away\nI have forgot the very name men called me.\nThe axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream,\nAnd hunts and wars are shadows. I recall\nOnly the stillness of that sombre land;\nThe clouds that piled forever on the hills,\nThe dimness of the everlasting woods.\nCimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.\n<\/em>\nOh, soul of mine, born out of shadowed hills,\nTo clouds and winds and ghosts that shun the sun,\nHow many deaths shall serve to break at last\nThis heritage which wraps me in the grey\nApparel of ghosts? I search my heart and find\nCimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night. <\/em><\/pre>\n\n<\/div>
\n\nYou probably know Robert E. Howard, the prodigiously productive American pulp adventure author best known for stories of Conan the Cimmerian. The poem here is interesting in that it is apparently the first flash of inspiration for said story cycle: Howard wrote the poem in early 1932, only a little prior to the first Conan stories. The inspiration, according to himself, came to him while touring Texas, contemplating the natural vistas of the Rio Grande valley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cimmeria<\/em> is written as non-rhyming metric poetry, a super-class typical of epic poetry in various languages. In English the form is particularly called “blank verse”, being bare of rhyme so usual in lyrical poetry. The blank verse is for English-language poetry a bit like the Kalevala verse is for Finnish poetry; a rhythmic verse bereft of cheap rhyming distractions, well-suited for narrating a story.<\/p>\n\n<\/div>
\n\nHarkening back to last week’s topic of literary criticism, I’ll make some hopefully helpful or interesting observations about my own reaction to the poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Hyperborean context of course makes the poem super-charged for people with Conan in the brain, evoke as it does all kinds of ideas about the literary journey Howard was about to set on, the content of the text intermingling with the life of the man. Later literature gives heft to an early poem authored before a single Conan story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Setting that aside, the poem is superficially set in the traditional poetry genre of “nature poetry”, which for me generally means instant condemnation into the ghetto of bourgeoisie mentality; I’m a fairly good reader, which makes it possible for me to read poetry at all, but I also have a short fuse when it comes to staid forms, and poetry is so very riddled with the conventional that my pressure bar starts to rise rather quickly when a poem starts meandering around matters of nature, feelings, or other cliches. So much poetry about nature and the human heart exists, the lot of it by and large going nowhere interesting, that encountering one more is tinged with boredom from the start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cimmeria<\/em> begins with a heavy dash of natural description:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The dark woods, masking slopes of sombre hills;\nThe grey clouds' leaden everlasting arch;\nThe dusky streams that flowed without a sound,\nAnd the lone winds that whispered down the passes.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
So yeah, that’s some nature poetry, and it continues for another section like that. If this was all there was to the poem, just three dozen verses of nature description, well, ugh… there’s an ever-important counterpoint that comes in later on to salvage the poem, but it is fairly slow about introducing its actual theme. I wouldn’t blame anybody for parsing through the first part quite quickly; I sure did at first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Regarding the art of poetic image, Howard’s style isn’t the worst; I rather end up liking it. In this first part, for instance, he says<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The grey clouds' leaden everlasting arch;<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
which I think is a fairly neat image. It’s reasonably original \u2014 doesn’t ping as a cliche to me \u2014 yet captures the idea such that I have no difficulty visualizing what he means. The other three verses aren’t quite as good, being slightly more conventional, but they get the job done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a good place to observe that I’m not very good with gauging the rhythmic qualities of English-language poetry; it’s not a native language to me, and I understand it much, much better as a written form than a spoken one. It doesn’t help that English has such drastic accents that who knows how Howard would even pronounce these words. Many of the verses flow neatly to my ear, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t very pure as iambic pentameter; the meter exists, but not very tyrannical. If I had to present this orally, I’d probably shoot for a relatively prosaic tone, letting the rhythm come to the fore only occasionally. I can imagine how I’d spend like 50 hours parsing my way through figuring out how this is even supposed to be spoken; poetry should definitely be orated by natives, I can imagine how much easier parsing this would be for somebody with a natural opinion of how these words are pronounced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An important thematic element that was very relevant for my side project (more on that later) is that Howard’s way of discussing the Cimmerian landscape heavily parallels present-day Finnish nature lyricism. Cimmeria<\/em> could easily be authored by Timo Rautiainen or one of many other Finnish rock musicians, whose view of what Finland is<\/em> has since the ’90s shifted to display a similar cynicism that we get in this poem. Basically, nobody would blink an eye if you just swapped the poem’s title to Finlandia<\/em> and asserted all this secrecy, darkness and stilness to the deep Finnish interior. So that’s a thing that colors my reading here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you actually read the poem, you noticed that Howard does the good thing that smart people do with nature poetry: he reflects the nature imagery to human condition and therefore elevates the description of the natural environment into a description on human nature, which is a fine thing to do and arguably the only thing you should ever do with nature poetry. (Want to encounter a truly dim human mind? Dig up one of those poets who feel compelled to write nature poetry without this aspect.) In the case of Cimmeria<\/em>, the story is no less than a sort of origin story for the entire Hyborian cycle: Howard-the-author feels constrained and lessened by this modern age, and is thus forced to reach towards a sort of Mythago Wood<\/a> of Cimmerian antiquity, the timeless state of nature and natural man that still captures the existential truths that he so yearns for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Here’s a simple gloss of the poem’s content for the impatient, just a description of what it says part-by-part:
1)<\/strong> Nature stuff;
2)<\/strong> Nature stuff;
3)<\/strong> Half-verse more of the nature stuff, plus the natural geography so far depicted gives rise to a sullen and secretive nature;
4)<\/strong> The nature of this place hides within the manly tale of glory that we, modern humanity, cannot remember;
5)<\/strong> My soul is reborn of this ancient cycle, unable to let go and embrace modernity, and thus I find Cimmeria within.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThis is some top-notch shit once you get past the slow start, or manage to internalize it as the integral simile that is intended, with the dark brooding woods and barren cliffs being simultaneously real geography and metaphors for the subconscious. Because doing that is basically impossible without a circular reading (reading through the text multiple times, starting again at the beginning at the end), I would argue that the poem has presentation issues, but I’m sure Howard would disagree simply because this is how poems are presented, he’s doing nothing out of the ordinary in that regard. You just gotta accept that most poetry will only make sense when you’re reading it the third time through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My single favourite verse:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not even lightened by the rare dim sun\nWhich made squat shadows out of men;<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The poetic image is original and striking, and it’s full of meaning, so what’s not to like. It took me a while to realize that “made squat shadows out of men” is dual-meaning: either the Cimmerian landscape turns its people into “squat shadows”, sullen and oppressed people, or it’s a more literal description of how the sun casts a squat shadow out of man when it sits high in the sky or there’s a slope or whatever. This is a fine example of what I meant by the nature imagery being put to use in discussing human nature.<\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n\n
Whence the feature topic<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
This is a good place to explain why I’m talking poetry all of a sudden: I did a little arts and crafts project with the guys this week, and it involved doing a bit of poetry, which I found rather enjoyable. The graphic design part was cool as well. I probably should go to work for some marketing company somewhere if I like doing product development so much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/isabout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/Cider-Labels-pdf-1024x724.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nThe project was a little injoke of a concept demonstration for home-brew cider labels: Antti had brewed his first-ever batch of cider (callback to the Wheel of Apples<\/a> from last month!), so I had Sipi draw us some appropriate art and then did some copywriting and graphic design to whip up a funny label for Antti’s cider bottles. Printing them out and applying to the bottles was unexpectedly easy, helped along by there being just ~30 bottles. Not too much of a chore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The pulp fantasy theme for the cider was inspired by the distinctly slavery-like conditions we suffered earlier to press the apple juice that would become the cider. I imagine that the label speaks for itself in that regard, for all that it’s in Finnish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- Epic Irregularity<\/a><\/li>
- Whence the feature topic<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/li>
- A sample poem<\/a><\/li>
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/isabout\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/Kalevala-form-diagram-1024x181.png\")
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