I had never heard of the poet Trumbull Stickney, which is not surprising, since he died in 1904 at the age of thirty having published only one volume of verse (Dramatic Verses, Boston: Charles E. Goodspeed, 1902). I discovered him, as I discover many good things, at wood s lot, where you can find two of his poems in today’s post (the sonnet “The melancholy year is dead with rain” and “Mnemosyne”); they are as good as anything Pound wrote before he discovered his true voice in Cathay, and what might Stickney’s true voice have turned out to be like once he’d shaken off the clinging tendrils of the nineteenth century? Fruitless speculation, of course, but one late fragment raises the hair on my neck in the way only true poetry can:
Sir, say no more.
Within me ‘t is as if
The green and climbing eyesight of a cat
Crawled near my mind’s poor birds.
one’s whole existence left in the combination of some few magical words, he achieved his trace ‘material buddhahood’ and that’s enough imho
Hmph. You probably haven’t heard of Adelaide Crapsey either.
i’ve found AC’s Verse through wiki&google books, thanks
I was vaguely familiar with her via Robert Frost. Anyway, she had six more years to poetize.
Stickney had been diagnosed with brain cancer when he wrote that fragment.
Crapsey is largely forgettable.
Stickney had been diagnosed with brain cancer when he wrote that fragment.
so what? does it devalue his verse?
Crapsey is largely forgettable.
poor her, can’t be remembered by the modern literati
The poem was inspired by his illness. That’s all I was pointing out.
Crapsey’s work isn’t well known, because most of it isn’t very good.
what’s good and bad in poetry, how one can measure and mark poems
one writes and reads poems for oneself to honour the emotion, feeling or whatever it invokes, not to be remembered by the future generations
if even one person reads the poem and feels the same feeling it’s enough for the poem to be written and read
if you don’t feel the same, fine, just don’t bad-mouth another’s work
The desire to be considered “good” by posterity is not the only reason to write poetry, or for that matter create any type of art. I was surprised to find out that Crapsey was known for developing an American form of the cinquain, a poetry form that is easy to teach ESL students that makes creating in English very accessible. One cinquain much linked to is “Triad“. Another form she created was a couplet form of epigram, an example is “On Seeing Weather-Beaten Trees“. More of Adelaide Crapsey here.
maybe the meter, but it felt very close to me
as if she was a reincarnation of some mute inglorious Asian peasant 🙂
we have the triads in our folklore too, must be someone was trying his/her mind compiling them anonymously
and from the first link, TS’s “I heard a dead leaf run. It crossed / My way. For dark I could not see. / It rattled crisp and thin with frost / Out to the lea.”
that’s almost like how our poetry sounds (as far as my incomplete English can judge of course)
maybe the meter
The type of cinquain I gave my class was
Line 1: one word–the subject, usually a noun
Line 2: two words–describes the subject
Line 3: three words–action of the subject
Line 4: four words–an emotion about the subject
Line 5: one word–restates the whole thing
example in French:
Crapsey’s type of cinquains have two syllables in the first line, then four, six, eight, and then two in the last line. The number of stressed syllables is one, two, three, four, and one. Like in a haiku, the requirements of the short format can make the subject more condensed and focused.
Do the Mongolian triads have exact requirements?
http://www.mongoliatoday.com/issue/5/triads.html
maybe there are better translations, in my language those triads sound beautiful, in translation something is lost as always
i’ll try to find more and better translations
there are many mistakes in the link, sorry
Here’s a direct link to read’s Mongolian Triad Poetry.
It sounds very much like one type of poetry in Old Irish and Welsh.
Greek triads, Welsh triads, Triads of Ireland. Crapsey’s “Triad” seems very close to the Mongolian type, although it’s hard to tell about the meter.
An Irish triad:
oops, link malfunction fixed: Welsh triads
A triad from Kemr, the Brito-Romance kingdom of Ill Bethisad: “Three things the Romans left us: our language, our law, and our will.” I can’t lay my hands on the Brithenig version at present, alas.
I wrote a diamante once on the subject of XML for a contest. The rules were given as follows:
Here was my entry:
I added to the original rules a constraint on syllable length: the line lengths follow the binomial distribution.
only one volume of verse
A slim one, I suppose. I mean, nobody writes that Whitman wrote “only one [fat] volume of verse”, I don’t think.
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