. . . And Speaking of Odes

. . . And speaking of odes, as the previous post did, the Poetry Foundation's site has a nice definition of and overview of the venerable form:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5784

Keats's Autumnal Gem

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American baseball player Reggie Jackson was dubbed "Mr. October" because he performed so well in several different World Series. Fair enough. But before that, poet John Keats might have earned the same moniker, or at least "Mr. Autumn," for having written his great ode, "To Autumn." I thought of the poem today as, like a lot of people, I caught that hint of fall--you know, something about the air-temperature, the look of some foliage, the knowledge that a tide of students is going back to school.

Here are the opening lines, which should be indented in a certain pattern (but the blog-machinery doesn't like to cooperate with that sort of thing):

I

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom friend of the maturing sun,
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines round the thatch-even run:
To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells.


In this stanza as in the rest of the poem, Keats blends a deliberate, stately rhythm with a palpable sense of exuberance. The language of the poem itself seems almost to burst, full of ripeness. It's hard to achieve this kind of stateliness, common to odes, in contemporary poetry because there is a kind of demand for irony and cynicism. I happened to re-read the poem in Keats: The Complete Poems, edited by Miriam Allot, and published by Longman in 1970. The annotation of the poem reminded me taht the poem was written in September 1819 and was "the last of K.'s major 1819 odes" ( page 650).

The Ode, the Elegy, the First Draft

Today in the poetry-class I teach, we discussed two venerable types of poetry, the elegy and the ode. Among the topics we touched on was the apparent fact that it is difficult to identify subjects about which to write a serious ode, partly because "all the good ode-subjects have been taken" (at least at first glance it seems that way), partly because we live in skeptical, cynical, jaded times, and partly because the ode itself is encountered most often as a parodied form in advertising. Ultimately we brainstormed a list of possible subjects for serious odes. The list included mud; phobias; plastic; relatively invisible or under-valued persons who "serve" us as baristas, janitors, or waiters (etc.) [and most in class had worked in such jobs]; electricity; and food. The topic of food triggered a nice transition into our reading and discussion of Pablo Neruda's splendid "Ode to the Watermelon," as translated by Robert Bly.

When we discussed possible topics for an elegy, a poem about loss, we set aside the most obvious topic: the death of a loved one, and we brainstormed a list of "lost things" about which we might write an elegy. The list included health, wealth, virginity, hair, jewelry (or some other object with symbolic and/or commercial value), pets, space (for example, a field on which houses were later built), security, winter (for example, in some regions where it used to snow in winter, no snow now falls), one of our senses, keys, childhood, adolescence, and a wallet.

We saved 12-15 minutes toward the end of class in which to begin to write a poem, or at least to work our way toward a poem. Occasionally in that amount of time, one can come up with a whole draft, or at least a draft ("whole" is debatable).

For the heck of it, I decided to post the first (and so far only) draft I wrote, as is. I chose to write about a lost wallet.

[no title]

The first time I lost a wallet,
I didn't lose it--it was
stolen from a gray metal locker
I had not locked.

I remember sitting on the bench
in the vacuum left by theft.
I knew then what I don't
know now: the exact amount
of money stolen; the name
of the girl in the photograph;
and to whom the phone numbers
belonged. Those area-codes signify

much smaller geographic areas
now, and now my wallet is obese, swelled
with fatted plastic cards and multiple
ways of proving I exist. The first lost
wallet moved, thin and quickly, through
the crowd, possessed by a satisfied
thief, whom I wish well.