On the Writing Contest and the Lottery

Come on! Play Powerball! You could be the next winner!

Winning a writing contest, especially a prestigious one, may be the foot in the door for an aspiring writer, that splash in the literary pond that may get the attention of agents and pubishing houses.  More likely it is a flash in the pan, considering the sheer number of such contests offered by small presses, universities and arts organizations.  A perusal of the contest and award section of Poets & Writers Magazine gives an inkling of the extent of this market. Contests are only one part of the burgeoning business to help the unpublished get published.  The lure of getting a book published even if it is less than a thousand copies induces many writers to fork over the cost of the entry fee.  It’s like playing the slot machines. Beware feeding the machine more than you can afford to lose. The odds of your winning are stacked against you.

When I was young and was a dreamer, I thought I could win too. I wrote more than one check for an entry fee.  I do not envy the task of the judge who selects the ostensible “winner” from the group of outstanding finalists, most likely all of equal merit.  When the choice has to be made, the judge will be the first to admit that it probably amounts to a taste for one theme over the others. The very idea of having to deem one the best manuscript is distasteful to me. Clearly, today with the number of creative writing programs and excellent writers trying to break into the publishing world, there is a super-abundance of work worthy of recognition. There just isn’t the publishing dollars or the reading public to support all of them, so to my mind writing contests primarily benefit the organizations sponsoring them. The entry fees fund their activities and do not necessarily promote the interests of the writers. They rely on a legion of gullible writers, many with unpolished manuscripts, whose work is immediately rejected and whose checks are just as speedily deposited into the organization’s bank account. The entry fees are used to cover the cost of printing the magazine and books of the contest’s sponsor. Income from subscriptions to literary magazines is not sufficient to pay for its publication nor do sales of works classified as literary keep a commercial publisher in business, and certainly not a small press. In addition to proceeds from contest fees, the small independent press may have to rely upon grants and gifts from generous donors.

Although I am dubious of contests both because of the odds against winning one and the principle of singling out one work for recognition in a plethora of deserving writing, others will see merit in the proliferation of such contests. The effort of submission to these contests, the time expended and the money fruitlessly invested in my estimation are better spent in the writing of more stories, novels and poems, merely because the chances are slim of the aspiring writer ever gaining more fame or recognition in the literary world, even if he happens to win,  than the writer who does not spin the roulette wheel in a writing contest.

I wonder how many of those books that make the list of top 100 books of the last 50 years or the last 100 years ever won a pre-publication contest. These lists are interesting because there is quite a bit of congruence among the books chosen by different list-makers. I do see the value of publishers entering their best published works in a contest after the fact. The prize-winning books inevitably receive increased sales.  In any event, the unpublished author should venture into the land of competition with caution.  As anyone who habitually buys lottery tickets recites,”Someone has to win; it just as well could be me as anyone else.” I wish that person Bonne Chance!

Musings on Muses

Probably because the Greeks depicted sources of artistic inspiration as women, male authors throughout the ages often invoked a female muse. In Greek mythology each of the nine daughters of Mnemosyne and Zeus presided over a different art or science.  In twentieth century literary criticism Robert Graves in The White Goddess enthroned the divine origin of poetry in the feminine.  Poets have held in reverence a dark lady to whom they owe their inspiration and to whom they dedicate their literary efforts.  In fact, for much of literary history, outside of the purported Sappho of the Isle of Lesbos, female poets, if they existed, worked in obscurity. In recognition of this, the appearance of Anne Bradstreet in colonial America provided such a surprise that when her poetry was first published in England her work was titled The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, in reference to the female muses of Greek mythology.

It is right that I should muse upon woman as muse for man.  As I muse, interesting derivations of the word muse occur to me. Amusement means something that entertains or amuses, conveying the sense to give delight.  The verb muse means to ponder or reflect at length, to be absorbed in thought. A museum is a place ostensibly where the visitor can browse and muse at length upon the interesting objects collected. Originally, a museum was a place where the muses were worshipped.  An element of worship, adoration even of the virgin,  is present in the male poet’s invocation of his muse. Music is another derivation of the root word muse, and none more conducive in its harmonious aspects to a reflective frame of mind. What more than music can entertain, delight, amuse, and make the mind muse on things unseen.

Nine Greek Muses

Musing further on the subject of the muses, I scratch my head, wondering if women writers have ever invoked a dark male muse, a shadowy perhaps unobtainable lord, whom they identified as the source of their literary outpourings. I can think of no women writer, but if my readers can think of one, I would be glad to hear about her. I rather think the women writer has looked to herself to provide her  muse or at least a nebulous feminine mystique.  In other instances, the muse is her mother or her foremothers, maybe her grandmother or some ancient family matriarch.  Traditionally, in the case of the male writer, the muse remained eternally out-of-reach.  With modern women writers who look to the goddess within or a foremother, the muse seems much more accessible and realizable, being a woman also. I don’t see a man providing a muse in the traditional literary sense to a woman writer, although a male muse is possible for a male writer, as for example, with Shakespeare who was thought to have composed his sonnets with a male lover in mind.

Maybe the whole concept of a muse is sexist and dated. Yet writers, both male and female, still use the device to invoke the muse, calling up whatever spirit they wish as the source of their poetic inspiration.

To Teach Creative Writing

I ran across W. H. Auden’s comments on this subject in the Spring 1974 issue of The Paris Review. The interview was based on a 1972 conversation with the poet. In answer to the question whether he has ever taught writing, he replied: “To teach creative writing–I think that’s dangerous.” Dangerous is a rather strong adjective to describe the activity by which many published authors have to eke out a living when the earnings from their poetry books and mid-list novels do not pay the rent. Writers teaching aspiring writers how to write is a booming business. It is fair to state that the teachers of writing may be earning more money from workshops, community college courses, and writers’ conferences than they do from sales of their books. Besides, these venues provide other markets to sell their books.

But dangerous? Dangerous to whom and to what? Is teaching dangerous to creativity, to a writer’s productivity? Is the implication that the writer should devote complete time and effort to writing and not to teaching others how-to (and that raises the question whether creative writing can be taught or whether it is best mastered by doing it over and over again in a room alone)? I am  still pondering what Auden meant by dangerous. Since he was a teacher, Auden certainly wasn’t saying writers should not teach at all.  After using the startling word dangerous, Auden continues: “The only possibility I can conceive of is an apprentice system like those they had in the Renaissance—where a poet who was very busy got students to finish his poems for him. Then you’d really be teaching, and you’d be responsible, of course, since the results would go out under the poet’s name.”

This expansion left me as mystified as I previously had been with dangerous. In practice, Auden taught academic courses in literature at various universities in the United State and England. He believed that a grounding in the classics, in philosophy, traditional poetic forms, rhetoric and the humanities did more to develop the creative writer than any course that purported to teach creative writing. Apparently, this type of teaching is not dangerous, but the how-to courses are. 

I pondered longer and came up with an interpretation of the dangers Auden may have sensed.  Auden was espousing that contemplation, deep thinking, and familiarity with literary tradition precede the creation of art. Immersion in the great artistic works of previous centuries provides the best preparation for the aspiring writer. Auden went so far as to warn against teaching courses in contemporary literature. In this regard, he chose to teach only academic courses on eighteenth century literature and romanticism in which he could expound on the merits of the world’s enduring works. Auden was intent upon training of the mind first, after which, the would-be writer might be able to formulate some worthwhile thoughts of his own to share with the rest of humanity. Cogitation! That’s what pre-writing entails. Cogitation!  What a wonderful word for the purposeful wool-gathering preparatory to perhaps penning the great American novel.

The results of acting before thinking are evident in many arenas of modern life–impulsive consumer spending, anti-intellectual diatribes by political candidates, and the inability of college freshman to write coherent essays. Think before you write (or speak) seems a simple enough principle, but high school students are herded into the computer writing laboratory to write term papers before they have formulated one cogent idea in their heads, and consequently, launch into a cut and paste mission that brings plagiarism to a level that would have rocketed Miss Harrod, my high school English teacher, off her stool and through the school roof–and she would still be orbiting earth now in her floral dress and pearl necklace. 

It’s dangerous for a culture if society doesn’t learn to think first.

More of Szymborska

For decades the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska wrote a newspaper column that she called Nonrequired Reading. When I learned that some of these columns had been translated into English and published in 2002 under the title Nonrequired Reading: Prose Pieces, I ordered the book.  As she explains in her author’s notes, these are not the usual literary book reviews. Her choice of books is quirky and varied, more often than not they are non-fiction. The book is an excuse to write equally quirky pieces of one paragraph extending for no more than two pages, the topic suggested by the reading. Szymborska tells us right off the bat she is not interested in writing a treatise on the merits or the contents of the book. We are in for the unexpected, and she delivers.  I don’t recall ever laughing out loud so many times while reading a book, not even one reputed to be a humorous work.

Springboards for Szymborska’s column come from books on reptiles, the Chinese alphabet, home improvement, the history of clothing, graphology, a button museum, comic strips, and Alfred Hitchcock, to name but a few of her far-ranging interests. She comes away from these books with her characteristic oblique, odd twist on the subjects–wry slants which only Szymborska could think of, making us laugh at the understated or absurd aspects of the subject that the book’s author may never have considered. Szymborska has a delightful way of posing questions that makes me burst out laughing time and time again. Her response to a book on yoga is hilarious. Describing at length yoga’s bodily contortions on the “road to perfection” as corporeal macramé, she concludes the piece with: “At this moment the skeptic begins to disentangle himself from the Kukkutasana. We hope he’ll succeed without the help of paramedics.”  I thought this piece was hysterically funny until I got to her review of One Hundred Minutes for Beauty, in which she satirizes the exercise and beauty tips offered a woman all for the sake of making herself attractive to a husband who eventually moves out of  the house to allow his wife more space for jogging and long-distance jumping. “And do you know whom he’ll move in with, that husband?” Szymborska asks, and answers ”With Bozena, who begins steps from her knees, stands in line with slumped shoulders, and, can you imagine, looks her age. . . “ 

I guarantee you will also find something to tickle your funny bone in this collection of ninety-five short pieces–and this is only a selection from the three volumes of Nonrequired Reading (Lektury nadobowiazkowe) that Clare Cavanagh chose to translate.

I will keep Nonrequired Reading in the bathroom and reread these little essays in my bubble bath.

In Praise of Wisława Szymborska

"The world is astonishing, no matter what else we can say about it."

You may have never heard of Wisława Szymborska or her poetry. I am writing this to spread her fame a little wider. This Polish poet, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature, died in her sleep on February 1, 2012. She was 88 years young. How fitting her going, for she wrote in her poem “I’m Working on the World”:

Death? It comes in your sleep,

exactly as it should.

When it comes, you’ll be dreaming

that you don’t need to breathe;

that breathless silence is

the music of the dark

and it’s part of the rhythm

to vanish like a spark.

Only a death like that. A rose

could prick you harder, I suppose;

you’d feel more terror at the sound

of petals falling to the ground.

Only a world like that. To die

just that much. And to live just so.

And all the rest is Bach’s fugue, played

for the time being

on a saw.

The sardonic twist at the end is typical of her poetry. That wry humor suffuses her whole body of work in which she observes the extraordinary and the ironic in the familiar objects that she never finds ordinary. From plates and fans in a museum, to plants, to clouds, to an onion, everything around her astonishes. Her own penchant for poetry, she finds amusing as she writes in “In Praise of My Sister,” a sister who doesn’t write poems. In another poem “Poetry Reading,” she wryly reflects that a boxing match draws a bigger crowd:

To be a boxer, or not to be there

at all. O Muse, where are our teeming crowds?

Twelve people in the room, eight seats to spare–

it’s time to start this cultural affair.

Half came inside because it started raining,

the rest are relatives. O Muse.

. . . .

In the first row, a sweet old man’s soft snore:

he dreams his wife’s alive again. What’s more,

she’s making him that tart she used to bake.

Aflame, but carefully–don’t burn his cake!–

we start to read. O Muse.

I love the way Szymborska uses concrete images; I love the way she thinks of things I would never think of. Her poetry teems with her playful look at subjects. Who else would write a poem “In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself” or a poem about Hitler’s baby picture:

And who’s this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?

That’s tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers’ little boy!

Will he grow up to be an L.L.D?

Or a tenor in Vienna’s Opera House?

Whose teensy hand is this, whose little ear and eye and nose?

Whose tummy full of milk, we just don’t know:

printer’s, doctor’s merchant’s, priest’s?

Where will those tootsy-wootsies finally wander?

To a garden, to a school, to an office, to  a bride?

Maybe to the Bürgermeister’s daughter?

Szymborska’s humor can be black, but her understatements always astound and pack such a wallop, that I wish I could have written a poem nearly as good as her poem that I just finished reading. One of her poems that sticks long in my memory (and there are too many to choose from) is ”The End and the Beginning,” possibly the best poem ever written on the subject of war because of its powerful understatement.  The poem begins:

After every war

someone has to tidy up.

Things won’t pick

themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove

the rubble to the roadsides

so the carts loaded with corpses

can get by.

In her Nobel Prize lecture I discovered the reason why I like poetry more than politics. She states: “Poets, if they’re genuine, must also keep repeating, ‘I don’t know.’” Politicians are always telling us they have the answers; they hold the truth. Szymborska contends “Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know’. Each poem is an effort to answer a question. She continues in her lecture: “But any knowledge that doesn’t lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life. In the most extreme cases, cases well-known from ancient and modern history, it even poses a lethal threat to society.”

She bases her poetic credo on the belief that the world is astonishing; nothing is obvious. She writes, “But in the language of poetry . . . nothing is usual or normal . Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it . . . . And above all, not a single existence, not anyone’s existence in the world.” Like many of her poems, she cannot resist ending her lecture with an understatement: “It looks as though poets will always have their work cut out for them.”

I recommend you start exploration of Wisława Szymborska with Poems New and Collected 1957-1997. It includes all the poems in View with a Grain of Sand and also the complete text of her 1996 Nobel lecture. A new collection, Here, contains poetry she wrote since she won the Nobel Prize. She also has some unpublished poems in manuscript form that were not ready for publication at the time of her death.  The collaborative translation by Stanislaw Barańczak, Professor of Polish Language and Literature at Harvard and a Polish poet himself, and Clare Cavanagh, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Northwestern University, is so good that, as far as I am concerned, the poems could have been written originally in English.

Two interesting notes about her fame in Poland: her poem “Nothing Twice” set to music became a popular song. The Polish film director Krzysztof Kieślowski is said to have been inspired by her poem “Love at First Sight” in the making of Red, from The Three Colors Trilogy: Blue, White, Red–three wonderful films.

I wish my mother were still alive. If she were, I would ask her to read aloud in Polish to me all of Szymborska’s poetry and ask for her comments on them. Maybe I should write a poem in which I imagine Alice Dzierzgowska doing this?

Novel vs. Short Story: The Long and the Short of It

A good short story is more difficult to write than a novel. This is the conventional wisdom I remember from writing workshops and many books on the art of fiction. The argument goes something like this: Every word must count in a short story. The limitation of size and scope of the short story demand economy of language and precision in choice of detail.  Handling of dramatic development must be skilled to hold conflict, complication, climax and resolution in the space of twenty pages or less.  On the other hand, a novelist has latitude to be profligate. The novel in its sweep is forgiving in lapses of craft if the general flow is right.  As writers and readers we ought to examine the contention that shaping a small, delicate object entails more skill than a work of larger magnitude. Looking at other art forms, is it true that  a miniature sculpture of an elephant is more difficult to carve than a life-size one?  Is a small painting of a few square feet more difficult to paint than a mural that occupies the entire side of a building?

Sometimes aspiring writers are advised to master the short story before turning their hand to a novel. Many novelists have started with short stories before they wrote a first novel. Throughout her prolific career Joyce Carol Oates has worked in both genres.  Often the short story is viewed as a proving ground for fledgling novelists, the assumption being if the short story writer produces a great short story, of course, that same author can write a great novel. The decision whether a story lends itself better to treatment in a short story versus in a novel depends on such considerations as one main character seen over a short period of time or many characters interacting over years. A novel provides the scope for a many-layered story with multiple themes. The term slice of life arose to describe the short story’s close-up focus on one character, one event, and one main theme.

I’ve taken a second look at this prevalent notion that writing an excellent short story is more difficult than writing an excellent novel. I’ve come to the conclusion that the novel is the more difficult accomplishment. The difficulty does not lie in that one genre requires more discipline, craft, or artistry with the techniques of fiction than the other does; but that the novel’s size and the sustained emotional intensity over a far longer period of time account for its difficulty.

The short story is  a sprint of high energy; in contrast, the novel is an endurance run. I like to describe the process of writing a novel as a long journey into night–a night where morning does not come until the book is done.  Granted, the elements of fiction and the techniques of the craft are the same.  The novel is just longer and because of its length, of course, entails greater complexity and requires more time to complete; but the real difficulty arises in the novelist’s effort to maintain a consistent emotional intensity throughout the expanse of the novel and over the months or years that it takes to write a work of several hundred pages.

Instead of weighing one genre more difficult than another, we should describe the short story and the novel as simply different. One is long and one is short . . . for good reasons.

The Revision Stage

Before

Although in my younger days I preached the necessity of rewriting after the euphoria of finishing a first draft, I did not go tripping lightly to undertake that chore. I went dragging my feet and procrastinating. Some attitudes do change with age and I have experienced an attitude adjustment over the years toward revising, editing and proofreading. No longer is it the necessary, but onerous stage. I jump into revision with more gusto as if I were cleaning out messy closets, jumbled with old clothes and shoes I haven’t worn in years, dumping them gleefully into a trash bag. I feel the same zeal throwing out wrong words, lackluster prose, awkward construction, straightening and polishing all my verbal disarray as I do with discarding the junk in the closet.  Closets need rearranging and so do sentences and paragraphs,  scenes and sections of dialogue. This is no longer work for me but play.

 

The tapes of our mothers play in our head long after they have died. This one, A place for everything and everything in its place, plays for me whenever I clean out the closet or finish revising a piece of writing. Some tasks we do because we have to and some tasks because we love to do them. The transition from disliking revision to loving it was subtle, unconscious, built up through time and habit just as my awareness grew as I aged that I had absorbed the repeated refrains of my mother and they no longer rang like the stale wisdom of my elders.

After

As I revise my latest novel, The Wheels of Being, I marvel at how revision has now become my favorite stage in the writing process. I am on a search and destroy mission to root out any weak element. Aha, I found a clunky word!  Kill it. This is a muddled passage. Clarify. Expand. Smooth.  This is worn out; this has a hole in it. Trash or patch, which one? I am really enjoying this stage. After all these years, am I finally practicing what I preach? It seems so. Even better, I am thoroughly enjoying it. It feels like a walk in the woods or riding a bike. It’s fun!

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

This is a book  I have been meaning to read for a long time. As soon as I finished it a few days ago, I immediately returned to the first page and began reading again.  First published in 1998, I denied myself the immense pleasure of this novel far too long; for Barbara Kingsolver is the best contemporary novelist I have read in a while.

Kingsolver chooses the perfect way to narrate the story of an evangelical Bapitist missionary and his family who go to the Congo in 1960 during the tumultuous period of independence from Belgium. Chapters alternate among the mother Orealanna and her daughters Rachel, Leah, Adah and Ruth May telling the story.  The Congo will affect the five in strikingly different ways that illuminate the complex relations among the family, with the Congo, with religion, and with the crazed missionary zeal of the father Nathan Price. Kingsolver’s choice of names is always significant. The mother and girls, and ultimately the father, pay a price for their misguided mission to Christianize the Congolese, and their personal stories, reflect the tragedy of colonialism and the culpability of the United States and Belgium in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. But the politics form the backdrop of the saga of the Price family, each in turn, describe what the awful price was they paid for being accomplices with their father’s mission to presumably save Africa from heathenism. Watch for the number of times the narrators use the word price.

There are many reasons why this book stands out in recent American literature, not least of which, is the mastery with which Kingsolver creates the characters of the five narrators through their distinctive voices.  The viewpoints of the girls generate the powerful impact of the novel.  A great book has an inevitability about it in which all the aspects of fiction work so well together that to conceivably have written it differently would have diminished the effect. The dark continent as seen through four daughters and their mother who have been uprooted from Bethlehem, Georgia, and their subsequent exodus from the Congo, in the wake of  tragedy carries the most powerful emotional force possible and reveals the horrific damage European colonization visited upon foreigners and Africans alike. Although this is a story of death, disease, poverty, hunger, and political treachery; the voices of the three teenage sisters and the five-year old Ruth May often sound humorous notes as they observe their absurd and precarious situation plopped down in a  jungle village, the only whites except for visits of the pilot Eeben Axelroot who flies in supplies. Many authors can weave a good plot nowadays; the great writer also demonstrates playfulness of language that continually delights. Adah’s palindromes and Rachel’s hilarious malaproprisms add depth and zest to their personalities. Kingsolver captures the tone of the youngest child Ruth May, and it is her voice that brings the novel to a beautiful conclusion in the final chapter.  Not only does Kingsolver achieve wonders in creation of character but also in the description of the setting. I feel, smell, see, taste, and touch that Congo. It oozes with the breath and life of plants, animals, the river, the mud, the colorful clothes of the Congalese, and the green mamba snake slithering in the dust–an image of a fallen Garden of Eden six centuries after the first Portuguese paddled up the Congo River.

Kingsolver deftly ties Biblical references and dramatic scenes together, suggesting in the juxtaposition of characters and in the interactions of blacks and whites, the novel’s main themes. I carry away from my two readings of this book over the span of two weeks the travail of sorrow, an appreciation that the illusions we carry can both harm and redeem, and that the truths we hold dear are culturally determined.  Everything about this book shouts excellence–theme, plot, character, language and organization–so that I urge you to read it and find out why the Bible is called poisonwood.

Winter and Writing

Living in the north country of cold and snowy winters can be conducive to the writing life, particularly if one is not overly fond of outdoor winter sports, driving on icy roads, or bundling up for the weather.  I have been making great progress on my latest novel this winter season. Cabin fever is no problem, because I have been transported out of my present surroundings into the fictional world I am creating.

The reality is that the snowfall, unlike last winter that made a five-foot canyon of my driveway, has been scarce. The snow on the ground now at 4000 feet elevation in the Salish-Kootenai range of northwest Montana does not make for good cross-country skiing, so that I have not been tempted to put on my skiis, enticed away from writing into a winter wonderland. The scanty snow is making me think that winter has been cancelled this year for lack of interest. Old Man Winter drifted north and dumped his load on a small town in Alaska.

The winter energizes me to write more. In retrospect, I think I have always got the most writing done in winter.  I don’t mind bundling up, wearing heavy sweaters and Cabela’s underwear. How did William Faulkner and Eudora Welty write in that muggy, sticky southern heat? I don’t know.  Fans, desert/swamp coolers, the early days of air-conditioning, a mint julep to fortify sweaty fingers?  Besides, I like being outside too much–writing on my deck in summer–to want to live in a controlled indoor environment like Florida. The state could not have been developed without universal air-conditioning. So I’m a damn Yankee . . . oh, well. I was born in Chicago.

Since my energies have been focused on finishing the first draft of the novel in progress, I have neglected the weekly posts to “How Public Like a Frog.” I confess I have gone extremely private. A nature that tends to the reclusive and introverted has regrettably gone more so. However, I will emerge from this cocoon come February when we vagabond to the southernmost lower 48. I anticipate doing some bird-watching and fishing on South Padre Island. In the evenings I’ll be reworking the first draft of The Wheels of Being in the truck-camper as I incorporate the comments and suggestions of my number one reader and critic, Rod Rogers, also spouse and travel companion, fellow author, and jack-of-all-trades.  I’ll be sending more frequent blog posts your way as we circle the country over six-eight weeks.

The Road Forks: Song This Way and Poem That Way?

The tradition of poetry derives from music and oral performance harking back to the bards of Greece and the medieval minstrels. Ballads through the ages have been collected and published to be read. Yet in the twentieth century poetry in the popular mind resides in song lyrics, Broadway musicals or perhaps in the hit songs of Bob Dylan.  Songs are the closest that most people ever come to poetry today.

But that is not a bad place to start. It is in fact where my classmates and I started in our methods in education course. We used Beatles’ song lyrics to introduce our unit on poetry. T.S Eliot still had the audacity to title his famous poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Don’t tell me that the lines: “In the room the women come and go\Talking of Michelangelo” and “I grow old . . . I grow old . . .\I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” do not replay in the mind like a song lyric.

I have always contended that good poetry must have musicality; the traditional devices of poetry–rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, refrains, etc.–are used to create it. Walt Whitman’s poetry has musicality because he makes extensive use of the rhythm created by repetition of grammatical structure in phrases and clauses of the same cadence.

In his new book Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) Stephen Sondheim asserts that his lyrics are not poems and that songs and poems are not the same. I beg to differ with him. Good poems can be sung and composers have often set them to music. Others support Sondheim’s contention, saying poetry today is of the intellect and songs are of the emotions, as if never the twain shall meet.  Commonly, poets the likes of William Blake in his Songs of Innocence and Experience and of audacious Whitman in his “Song of Myself” boldly proclaimed the relationship of song to poem. Not many do so today. I recall one of my poems I ironically titled “A Song to End all Songs of Love.” My poem “Song of Hononegah” was adapted as part of Fred M. Hubbell’s choral work Sinnissippi Saga, which was performed by the Community Choral and Concert Choir on April 22, 1992, in Rockford, IL. Edith Sitwell in 1922 attempted to reclaim poetry’s birthright with Façade, a collection of poems that the British composer William Walton set to music.

As long as much of modern poetry remains unmusical, academic and obscure most of us will continue to satisfy an innate desire for poetic language with song lyrics. And that is fine with me. But I must also reassert that the best of the world’s poetry of necessity is inherently musical. The two paths have not diverged in the woods. It is primarily the academic poet who has diverged from poetry’s roots in song and choral presentation.