September 11, 2003

I feel the need ... for iambic pentameter?

I can't quite figure out why John M. Ford's name sounds so familiar. I think it's
a cross between the famous director of similar name (no M.) and the fact that it
sounds like a character out of L.M. Montgomery. (Well, you know, he'd have had to
be a son of Ken and Rilla Ford, mentioned in one of the later stories ... oh,
never mind.) At any rate I do like his poem href="http://nielsenhayden.com/110.html">110 Stories. I'm a sucker for those
old-fashioned things like rhyme and scansion, especially when used in a poem that
doesn't suck, that shows some craft and imagery and so on.

It's been
an interesting thing to notice over the more disastrous moments of the past few
years: something about great collective sorrows or (more rarely) joys seem to call
out in us a collective need for poetry. There will probably not be a memorial
service today that does not include some sort of verse or song along with the
names. Look back at the online diary entries from September 11 or the day of the
Columbia explosion: when those things happened, many, many of us borrowed others'
words that day. A little later, many attempted their own poetry in order to shape
worldshaking events into something they could absorb. I have no doubt the same
happened the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, or the day of the treaty at Appomattox
or the day Martin Luther King was killed, though then it would have manifested in
private letters or newspapers or chuch bulletins. I have no doubt the same is
happening today in Sweden in response to the assassination of Anna
Lindh.

Humans seem to need poetry for more private emotions too: we
ignore it, most of us, in calm times but then find some verse to be read at
weddings and funerals and graduations. From the executed murderer who borrowed href="http://dichroic.diaryland.com/bkfriwon.html">Invictus for his final
defiance to the entire href="http://www.petloss.com/poems/maingrp/apolgies.htm">page of poems, many
execrable, each of which has nonetheless comforted a person bereaved of a pet, the
same pattern shows. People who could not quote more of any verse than "Roses are
red, violets are blue," at normal times, somehow find themselves needing something
more than prose at their best and worst moments.

Posted by dichroic at September 11, 2003 12:17 PM
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