Random excerpts from the Norton Anthology of Poetry:
I have what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, / But I do not talk of the beginning or the end (Whitman). The Soul selects her own Society— / Then—shuts the Door— / To her divine Majority— / Present no more— (Dickinson). Here is the ancient floor, / Footworn and hollowed and thin, / Here was the former door / Where the dead feet walked in (Hardy). Trenched with tears, carved with cares, / Hope was twelve hours gone (Hopkins). The time you won your town the race / We chaired you through the market-place (Housman). While still I may, I write for you / The love I lived, the dream I knew (Yeats). Out of me unworthy and unknown / The vibrations of deathless music: (Rutledge). And God stepped out on space, / And he looked around and said: I’m lonely—I’ll make me a world (Johnson). A star glide, a single frantic sullenness, a single financial grass greediness (Stein). In the brown water, / Thick and silver-sheened in the sunshine (A. Lowell). But I was well / Upon my way to sleep before it fell, / And I could tell / What form my dreaming was about to take (Frost). Down between the walls of shadow / Where the iron laws insist, / The hunger voices mock, / The worm wayfaring men (Sandburg). Or do the boughs / Hang always heavy in that perfect sky (Stevens).
After twelve hours of talking, all hope was gone. The frantic tears had not brought God out of space, through the former door of the dead and into the footworn wayfarers. The sunshine they had enjoyed disappeared into the shadows, and the iron laws of Society won the race. Outside, a perfect sky hollowed out the glide of carved stars on God’s ancient floor, and the greediness of the world wormed its hunger into the boughs of his deathless music. A single, unworthy soul shuts the door on the dream and hangs onto the vibrations of loneliness.
1939
Twelve hours of talking,
feet dead from walking,
one undeserving wayfarer
suffers a lawless terror.
The sun on the boughs,
a lone worm carves out
a grassy, iron-rich spread—
hungry for the dead.
Under deathless skies
an ancient god cries
as a heavy, hollow soul
glides through a starry hole.
Pauline,
ReplyDeleteThis journal entry is, by far, the best example of what a calisthenic exercise should look like, and even more so what is has the ability to and should produce if given the time. With that said, I think that by taking an anothology jammed full of poems sets anyone, in this case you, who is in hopes of producing a promising piece off to a great start. What's even more intersting to me is how you not only used bits and pieces of various randomly collected lines throughout the anology, but also your own creative hand to structure a rather lengthy paragraph brimming with specificity and new ideas working in odd, fresh ways. The last exercise in your calisthenic entry is a great working draft; it is also (as I said at the beginning) a prime example of what a calisthenic exercise can potentially produce each and every time. I thnk the end draft you were able to create from this process is very promising, and holds a lot of weight for further expansion and possibilities. Wonderful job!