Poem in your Pocket Day

Poem in Your Pocket: Counting Out Rhyme

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been dealing out the civic poetry so far this American National Poetry Month, but for today’s Poem in Your Pocket Day here’s a charming poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay. If I understand Poem In Your Pocket correctly, its idea (as distinct from the entire Poetry Month) is to put emphasis on publicly sharing other people’s poetry. The rest of Poetry Month has a lot of examples of encouraging the writing of poetry oneself: poetry prompts, daily haiku writing pledges, poets putting forward their own work, and so on. That’s all fine—but this Project from its beginning has sought to go beyond the supply side to encourage the consumption of poetry. With the recorded musical versions we make here, there’s a modest hope of community in singing or speaking the poetry aloud. A song not heard is one of those trees-falling-in-an-uninhabited-forest things—whatever the result, it means to be a sound.  Now onto today’s poem, situated in a forest.

Counting-Out Rhyme

.

“Counting-Out Rhyme”  indicates with its title that it should be considered as that children’s game or process. As a game, a counting-out rhyme is a delineated incantation, each beat accompanied by a pointed indication around a group until the ending beat arrives and the final pointed-to individual is chosen. The most common folk poem in this manner in my childhood was “Eenie, Meanie, Miney, Moe.”*

I, having emigrated from the republic of childhood so long ago, have no idea if kids still use this process on playgrounds. From my more recent experience as a parent, modern younger children who would use it seem more supervised more often than my cohort, and responsible adults might be likely to select without rhymes. In my day, when the 20th century still had decades to run, kids just knew how this worked via the folk process.

Despite its title, as I worked with Millay’s poem I couldn’t really think she authored it for playground uses. Though not a long poem, it’s longer than it needs to be for selection, and the poem seems utterly beholden to its own, internal, incantatory powers. It picked up from the Imagists the flagrant naming of colors, decoration not needed for utility. I suspect Millay is remembering her own New England childhood here, much as E. E. Cumming was recalling his in his Spring poem, and the poem is rather more a magical spell, one meant to bring on Spring or bring one back to when the woodland sights of it were unprecedented and wonderous. It’s lovely word-music, and I heard it from off the page — and then played it in the musical version below — as a languid song, not the hurried rota of trying to make a quick, randomized choice.

In a week when chronological adults (whatever their maturity) are playing counting-out games with numbers that will empty or fill pockets and prisons, I share this poem from my pocket — not legal tender, but Spring tender. With the audio player below you can hear me perform this with 12-string guitar and sparse contributions from an ensemble of viola, violins, flute, clarinet, English horn, and silence. No player? You won’t need to find a wood-nymph to cast a spell, I provide this highlighted backup link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*In my experience from my times and place, the following line always included that dammed ethnic slur that makes the opening line of nonsense words almost offensive in anticipation. I noted in the Wikipedia article on that verse that the ethnic slur was an American variation, and there are multiple theories of the rhyme’s origin without it. I have no full accounting of the harm the slur brought by its childhood ubiquitousness — but I was somehow pleased to read as an aged adult that it was something the folk process added in America, and in order to form a more perfect playground republic, the same process can remove it.

The other similar selection process I recall from childhood was deciding which side would bat first in kids-run baseball games by alternating two kid’s hand-grasp up the length of the barrel of a bat until the final grasp topping the length was up first. Wouldn’t flipping a coin be faster? I’m not sure we had coins in our pockets back then.

The Coromandel Fishers

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

It’s Poem in Your Pocket Day in the midst of U. S. National Poetry Month. This lily gilding observance aims to integrate poetry more completely with ordinary life. A great way to do that would be to bring poetry and our workdays together, something we rarely do.

For National Poetry Month I have been selecting and performing poems from a pair of poetry anthologies published in the 1920s for children: The Boys  and The Girls Book of Verse.  There’s little in the two books about ordinary work life. You might explain that as “Well, those books were for kids after all” — but the same could be said about many a poetry collection or anthology, then or now.

Our last piece, a famous poem by Wordsworth, touches on the weariness of work, speaking of the getting and spending part of life. Other than military service, there is little else in these children’s books about working for a living, so today’s piece stands out. “The Coromandel Fishers”  sounds, even on the page, like a folk song, a work song, something that might be sung in the tedium and effort of daily labor. It’s author, Sarojini Naidu, published it in a section of her poetry that she called “Folk Songs,” so it really does ask to be sung, which you’ll see below I’ve done.

the Caromandel Fishers

A reminder of the casual game I’m playing here with this pair of gendered anthologies: was this in the girls or boys book of verse? Answer below.

.

Naidu is little known in America but led a fascinating and significant life. She was born in an India ruled by Great Britain as a colonial possession, was educated in England, and during that education touched bases with literary figures there. William Butler Yeats’ father, an artist, sketched her as a young student, and while a young poet she was called “The Yeats of India.” Despite that start, she more-or-less left poetry for a life of political activism. Upon her return to India she became a key lieutenant of Gandhi, marched and strategized with him, was imprisoned twice by the British for her activism, and after Indian independence served in the new Indian government.

Sarojini Naidu sketeched by John B Yeats and with Gandhi

The young Naidu while studying in England as sketched by W. B. Yeats’ father, and during the famous Salt March with Gandhi. Gandhi thought the Salt March would be to arduous for women, Naidu thought otherwise.

.

I happen to have had a few more hours to work on music this past week as my teenager has started their first job. I, an old man, think often about my decades of paid labor. I recall the dailiness — yes, sometimes the weariness — of that. But here’s what I think of more often: the coworkers — A fair feld, ful of folk, fond I there bytwene, of alle manere of men, the mene and the pore, worchyng and wandryng as this world asketh.*  I recall the thereness of these, my colleagues for the majority of my life’s waking hours, working in common cause. I’d often have a poem in my pocket in those years, a draft of my own, or a song of another on those days after days. Another thought: not often enough was the poem in my pocket about them, about the world of work we shared. Wordsworth said in his poem I sang last time that “The world is too much with us” — and we poets too often, too completely, stop at that phrase. I tried to outline in response: Wordsworth’s poem is more complex than we think it is, that his poem says everything is out of tune. Naidu’s fishermen, like the political activism she joined after writing this poem, says that we may sing to align us with the world.

Here’s an anecdote I read about Naidu. At the end of her life, she was weary from the wear-and-tear of political administration. Doctors said she must stop at whatever place she found herself, but she was restless, she could not rest. Finally, she asked a nurse to sing to her, and she fell asleep. In that night she died.

A couple unrelated last notes, and then you’ll have the opportunity to hear my performance of the song I made from Sarojini Naidu’s poem. She seems to have been the only person of color to have a poem in the two 1920s children’s anthologies,** and just as Wordsworth’s from last time, her poem of a world that’s with us, late and soon, ends up invoking the god of the sea. The audio player to hear me sing Naidu is below. No player? It’s not washed overboard, some ways of reading this blog hide it, so you can use this link as an alternative.

.

*Autocorrect didn’t have a stroke — can’t you read English? It’s a passage from the medieval poem Piers Plowman:

A fair field full of folk · found I in between,
Of all manner of men · the rich and the poor,
Working and wandering · as the world asketh.

**A fault I wouldn’t expect in any modern anthology for children, there are just too many good choices that are well-known and published now. It wouldn’t have hurt them to include a poem by American Paul Laurence Dunbar, or one of the translations from Chinese or Japanese by Arthur Walley — though the latter were new on the bookshelves at the time. I’ll allow them an excuse on a case near enough to the one for these 1922-1923 anthologies’ almost complete exclusion of Modernist poetry.

Are you taking part in this month’s quiz on which gendered book of verse Naidu’s poem appeared in. It was in The Boys Book of Verse.

See Emily (Dickinson) Play — I recast her poem “May-Flower” for National Poetry Month

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday I said poetry isn’t just beauty and wonder. Well, sometimes it is. Like this recasting of an Emily Dickinson poem into outright 1960’s wonderment.

I carried around a copy of the original text of “May-Flower”  today for Poem in Your Pocket Day, but alas I wasn’t assertive about it. Should I have been?

The staff at the café I biked to were maybe my best chance, but I was still waking up. Then at the bank, my own variation on Miss Stillwagon had needed to take several helpful minutes to go over questions from an African immigrant accented small businessman before I stepped up to her window, and I didn’t know if she wanted to know about Dickinson’s spring flower just then. Instead, we exchanged the brief small talk about how cold this April has been.

Then at the grocery store I always take the human checkout line, thinking that that supports someone’s job in this scanned beep and bloop age. The cashier in the lane I picked must have hit her off-switch for the Lane 8 sign simultaneously as I plopped the first bag of cherries I’ve seen this season on the belt.

“Didn’t you see my light was off?” Which I hadn’t, probably looking down in my cart for the next item to unload. “Well, that’s OK” she said as she efficiently rung up my small batch of items in a dozen seconds. Still, she didn’t seem all that open to Emily Dickinson’s offering of the aspects of a flower. Out in the parking lot, as I packed up the groceries, a pickup truck pulled in and had, I noticed, a “Media is the virus” Alex Jones bumper sticker. I was putting my N95 mask back in the envelope I pocket it in. I didn’t think it worth putting the mask back on to ask him about “May-Flower.”

So, you are left to hear it.

I sometimes sense when reading a certain kind of Emily Dickinson poem that she’s in a visionary or unusual state of perception. The various theories about her mysterious illness including vision symptoms are one level of explanation, but then I also suspect her cast of intellect and a dose of Transcendentalism could explain some of it. So it is with “May-Flower,”  which is ostensibly a riddle for which the reader is to guess the particular type of flower. That may be her intent, but the scattered aspects of the flower she reveals, and her trademark specific originality of word choices*  are as full of swirling fluorescents as any psychedelic poster or LP cover.

Was it the pinkness of the flower that made me think of Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd?

.

In this classic performance from our archives, I decided to further unravel the poem she wrote — and then re-weave the words in a variety of orders and alignments while playing electric guitars, bass, and combo organ in my best rock ballroom approximation of Sixties’ amazement. The 1960s — not Dickinson’s 1860s.

You can hear it three ways. There’s a player gadget below, but some won’t see that and can then use this highlighted link instead. And as we’ve done for almost every post this National Poetry Month, there’s a fresh lyric video above too.

.

*I recently read a short piece on Dickinson by Alexandra Socarides. In it she reveals a poetic mentor, Carolyn Williams, had taught her an interesting way to appreciate Dickinson’s originality. She calls the exercise “Dickinson Mad-libs.” Here’s how she describes the exercise best done with lesser-known Dickinson poems: “I choose a line, a stanza, or a whole poem, and I take out some of its words (usually nouns and adjectives, but sometimes verbs as well), and I simply leave blanks where those words were. Then I ask the students to fill in the blanks. I tend to switch up which poems I use, even though I know several that work particularly well. I’ll never forget the time I used “Grief is a ________.”

If you don’t know “May-Flower” and haven’t listened to today’s piece, or if you want to try this exercise with another poet, here’s the Mad-Libs game for the poem’s first stanza:

May-Flower

Pink, small, and [ADJECTIVE].
Aromatic, low,
[ADJECTIVE] in April,
[ADJECTIVE] in May,

Give anyone, even a poet, guesses — a dozen or a hundred — to what Dickinson would use in those three blanks, and what would be their batting average? And here’s the even better trick: because of the sound of those words, I don’t have any sense that their author is over-trying to be “original.” The sound attracts you to them, however rarely you’d expect them.