The Shards of Gods

by Brett Rutherford

Theognis, high in honor
among the archaic Greeks
served Apollo, and thus
he pledged his patron:

“Lord, child of Leto, son
of the lightning-bearing
Zeus of Olympus, I kneel
at your feet and beg
the company of Muses.”

So, too, Theognis
loved every lad whose face
bore any semblance
     to Apollo,
abjectly, in the face of scorn.

“First breath, last breath,
and every breath between,
I consecrate to you,” [1]
he swore to the god,
an adoration worth
a thousand poems at least.

But as for me,
     I serve a fickle deity:
fleet Hermes who comes
and goes as he pleases,
the one who seldom arrives
by daylight,
but rather in dreams,
in ever-deceptive
masks and guises.

Apollo may bless the poets
who labor patiently
at measured epics. I wait,
instead for Hermes,
the avatar of sudden inspiration.

And, just as Theognis pined
     for noble youths
more bent on games and girls,

I spent my youth
     on fair-haired orphans,
     outcasts and dreamers,
my fellow exiles and reprobates.
Not one of them had a home
     to go to; most
had been written out of wills,
     turned out-of-doors
to their own devices.

Oft times I sleep
     with window open,
so that the god
     who makes house-calls
between his errands
may leave me the blossom,
root, or branch
for my next poem,

so too the strays,
scruffy and poorly shod,
may enter at random
when least expected,
in need of caresses.

And thus, through gods
and the shards of gods
on beautiful faces,
the night holds out
against the burning day.

 NOTE:

1. The Theognis quotes are paraphrased from his Elegaic Poems, I, 1-4.

 

 

Fragments in Defense of the Personal Poem

by Brett Rutherford

     After Callimachus, Aetia, i

Since those I call the “Telechines,"
(spiteful hammerers in bronze and brass
if I may summarize their style)
will give me no peace, attack me,
I feel compelled to notice them.
Those Cretans whose ignorance appalls
Athena, complain about my poetry,
as though they stood in line with Homer,
because I did not write one epic full
of battles and contentious gods, or lists
of all the ships and those who sent
and manned them, because I did not
catalog the single serpents
on the head of all three Gorgons
and give each one’s biography,
I am only a child to them,
scribbling with chalk my epigrams.

“Look, you’re getting on,” one tells me,
“and nothing to show but love throes
and temple hymns that reach an end
before a single cup of wine has cooled.”

And I say back: “Desist, you race
of expectant critics, all you who feed
on iambics and hexameters.
Long-winded goatherds around a fire,
beat-counters, foot-pounders,
your output is tin by the yard,
while I, in the space of two hands
gather fine gold at the cost of blood
in threads as thin as spiderwebs.

Oh, what my poems cost me!

 

 

2

Poems are sweeter when they are short.
An epic would cover a ball-field;
a lyric’s span is measured
in a two-hand count of heartbeats.

Fatten the offering, as Apollo says,
but only go home with the slender Muse.

The wide track where many chariots
pass from city to city may please
the armies, merchants, messengers,
but I who walk upon two legs
at leisure on my twisty trail,

for me the winding lane,
the path untrod, the den and lair
of the wild one —
here I will pause and write.
A clear spring’s water
and the fruit at hand
suffice me. At love, I contend

with no demons or demigods;
at war, my broken staff
is all but useless, so cease
to demand I sing of Sparta,
or Troy, or the rampant Persians.

Here with the cicadas
I hear no braying asses.
Age weighs me down.
If ever I had fire
like Enceladus, now
I sink beneath the piles
of rock and mountain
where Time entombs me.

No matter! I am content.
One modest Muse did not disdain
to walk with me when I was young.
Here in this lyric brevity
she still companions me.
Humbled and gray now, I persist.

And as for you, who harry me
for what I did not write,
there is a special punishment
the Muses reserve: your names
in footnotes, and nowhere else.

 

 

The Why of It

To see the world
from within it,
above and below,
inhabiting each
and all of its beings,
not self-effaced
but self-expanded,

to sort significance
from noise and boredom,
to put aside all pain
for the sake of a thing
made only of words —

this is the calling.

Rhyme Not for the Sake of Rhyming

by Brett Rutherford

What can I say

about poems that rhyme?

Rhyme in mid-line,

or lines apart where least

expected, are fine:

they are like accidents

of digestion, a dash

of pepper. I like, too,

a final couplet, the way

Shakespeare tells us

a scene or speech

has reached its end.

A bow. Applause.

But as for rhyme

at ends of lines,

onward, onward,

plodding, plodding,

pendulum regular,

forced search

of dictionary

all too evident,

jack-hammering,

a thousand times,

no! English is not

a rhyming language.

Drunk monks

and college students

corrupted Latin

with rhyme; then from

Italian it leapt the channel

to infest like unwelcome

caterpillars. Be gone!

Not only has rhyme's

ship sailed, it floated

back, a rotting hulk,

seaweed and barnacles,

seagulls and slime,

fouling our pure waters.

For we who have lived

since Whitman,

rolled to the flow

of beat poetry,

inhaled long breaths

and the abrupt

leaps of improvisation,

rhyme is child's play,

the delight of idiots --

the glue that holds

a song together,

admittedly -- but not

what makes a poem

a poem. Free verse

is tightrope walking,

no net below.

Why I Do Not Employ Rhyme

A FEW WORDS ABOUT FORM

by Brett Rutherford
From Whippoorwill Road: The Supernatural Poems, Sixth edition 2019.

Early Gothic or supernatural poems were imitative of ballads, and employed rhyme, and ballad measures, most typically six or eight syllable lines. Rhyme was assumed to be the norm for this kind of writing. The German ghost ballads, and earlier English and Scottish ballads that inspired them, set the mold for the Gothic poem.

As a poet of the 20th and 21st centuries, and having learned the art in San Francisco and New York in the twilight of the Beat era, I completely break with fixed rhyme and fixed meters. In the poetry circles in which I worked and began my serious writing and publishing, such poems were objects of scorn. The occasional accidental rhyme was a delight, a final couplet was an accepted nod to Shakespeare, and a sonnet was respected, provided its rhymes were executed with great subtlety.

While I have studied the supernatural poem in English from its sources through the early 1900s, in my annotated editions of M.G. Lewis’s Tales of Wonder and my own succeeding volumes, Tales of Terror, and acknowledged those fine works in their contexts, I continue to be convinced that fixed meter and rhyme in English are anathema. Even when I adapt a rhyming poem from Russian or German or French, I do not employ rhyme in my own English version. 


Do not mistake what I do for “free verse.” Inspired by Shakespeare, Poe, Shelley, Whitman, and Jeffers in poetry, by Bradbury in prose, and by Romantic art and music, I seek to use every device in the poet’s arsenal even while avoiding the dreaded rhyme. My works range from short-line improvisations to longer works in blank verse or extensions thereof. Not every line is “poetic,” and indeed, in some poems, there is a prosaic “warming up,” like the recitative before an opera aria, before the rhapsodic passages take flight. The narrative poem is a more relaxed medium than the short lyric. 

Many poems have leaped to the page, all but fully-formed. These days I awaken from a vivid dream and go straight to pen and paper, sometimes writing completely-formed stanzas (this is not a boast but a description of the process). 

Readers will recognize my debts to my masters, and of these resemblances I am proud. I continue to experiment with longer lines that have a more “operatic” breath, and almost all my poems are intended to be read aloud. The quest, even amid terror, is for language to offer the sense of sudden inspiration, and to deliver the sublime.