The Startling Delight of Senior Poetry: Space and Time Travel in Six Beat Sonnet Treats
In “Locksley Hall” the Victorian poet Tennyson evoked a familiar mood: “In the spring a young man’s fancy / Lightly turns to thoughts of love.” Youth, love, and musical poetry are so often intertwined that today countless young people sing about these tireless themes, and countless youthful (or nostalgic) hearers tune them in. Is there a role for oldsters in writing tuneful verse? I think my age — 77 — may prove for you a double lucky number.
I started my project with a formal focus, wishing to prove to myself and the reader that sonnets (14-line lyrics) with 6-beat lines can be just as fruitful for today’s poet as the 5-beat lines of Shakespeare were for him in his sonnets, not to mention his world-beloved verse dramas. But the more I wrote, the more a wider idea-scheme spread out before me, relating not to rhythm technique but to content. I found I could just as readily write about a huge and multiple yesterday as about the present moment.
Let’s think about yesterday, or rather about a zillion yesterdays. I’ve been taking decade-leaping time journeys, which include dialogic poems with friends alive and gone, in times and places near and far. In the present collection, dialogues with living friends predominate. To my Tasmanian friend and colleague Louise Fairfax (we both love German literature), I wrote poems for years in reply to her Australian photo landscapes, plus European locales that she photographed in her marathon racing and orienteering competitions. With Sister Wendy Beckett, a critic of the visual arts, I dialogued by responding in verse to paintings she praised and discussed in her books.
A series of wonderfully moody, dreamlike black-and-white photos by Stephani Schaefer occasioned more conversational replies. I’ve had particularly fruitful colloquies with Owego NY artist Anni Johnson about her paintings, sketches, and ceramic work, but also about her life as a gardener and rural gourmet with homegrown foods. You can breathe the country air and see the birds and animals when you read my versified interpretations of her e-mails. I con-verse at times with my Pakistan-born German friend, calligrapher and artist Shahid Alam. Lately a special feature of my dialogic life has been communications in verse addressed to my team of tech and marketing helpers at AmericanReal and Incubate Media!
How about the yesterdays I share with my friends among the long gone masters who never die? In poem 39 (“Wonder”) I’m still conversing, as I did in childhood, with Sir Julian Huxley, author of Religion without Revelation. As a violinist and singer I like to recall my experience with musical masters; so in poem 73 (“Uprush”) I recall my grade-school introduction to early 20th century opera composer Jaromir Weinberger. In 327 (“Monk”) I converse with a painting by Germany’s greatest Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, posted on facebook by my friend Michael Sharp. Maybe the climax of my dialogues with the departed is the sequence of poems where I respond to Ralph Waldo Emerson, philosopher and poet both.
I wanted the wanderings of Six Beat Sonnet Treats to correspond closely to the actual feel of living at age 77. My life — and yours, too, I would confidently bet — is fully as rich in both present and recollectible wonders as that of, say, Marcel Proust, who’s generally cited as the model for all memory-cultivators in his 7-volume autobiographic novel In Search of Time Past. By re-enlivening memories in an unprecedented way he gave a surprising future to the French novel. I try to parallel that by showing how daily versing for 16 years, resulting in an opus of over 10,000 poems, provides me an Aladdin-carpet of time travel. I can select anything I want at any time from any file, either in paper copy or on the computer. Or I can think about the joys of a low sugar count and a mug of instant with almond milk.
Our population is getting older, and the time-reach of our experience longer, and the implications for unexpected richness of recall greater. I’m exploring that new present, hoping to help create a startling future.
Martin Bidney is a poet, translator, scholar-critic, wordsong reviver, and podcaster. He is also the author and narrator of the audiobook, “Shakespair: Sonnet Replies to the 154 Sonnets of William Shakespeare,” which will be released soon on Audible.com. For more information visit martinbidney.org.
