National Poetry Month Challenge - Day 8
Ignorant of History
Daily
a panic
of mourning doves
bursts
from the lawn
with the lift
of the latch on my old-fashioned door.
By the time I return,
mere minutes later,
so have they,
for a repeat performance.
Is this avian dementia,
or is Santayana's dictum for the birds?
--Katherine Quimby Johnson. All rights reserved.
No rhyme, no meter, but I hope this is more than prose broken into short lines.
I do want to share with you this incident from my teaching life. In honor of National Poetry month, I decided to spend one class period of copyediting talking about editing poetry. I ran the lines of Keat's "Bright Star" and Frost's "Choose Something Like a Star" together and then asked the students to look at them and divide them into lines. After a few minutes, one student announced, "I don't think this is a useful exercise. line breaks are personal and an editor doesn't know what the poet intended." That was actually a great response, because, as another student pointed out, both poets used rhyme. That made the Keats easy. Frost was still a challenge, because his rhyme scheme for that poem is more idiosyncratic than it is for many of his poems.
Once we left rhyme, that also allowed me to talk to the students about meter and looking to see if someone who is writing in meter has, perhaps, strayed at some point. (I did also point out that, while you can't always do a straight copyedit on poetry, there is an editorial conversation to be had about effects that might be achieved by breaking a line at a different point, or not forcing a rhyme.)
(One of the purposes of this class is also to make students better writers.)
Stay tuned for Day 9. I have no idea what it will bring.