In the Christmas Carols are the covered truths
About the battered beauties who then love
Despite the signs, the signaled fears
That cue our cowing, that create our fights
And fletch our flights with the feathers of something
That kidnaps our courage. They execute a
Plan as if plotting, as if placing a mole
Merrymaking among our jaded
Ranks who revile, who renege on Christmas
Spirits like Scrooge. See the lovers
Leave us laughing? Look at them thrive
As they come alive and call us to rise
And love the leavers and lend to the dreamers
And sleep with the slackers who slumber in parks
And cosign their causes — they co-habit
With certain failure. See how they risk,
How they frisk their freedoms? Frayed are the strands
Of ambition they owned, once before this
Chance went and chose them. Now they will linger
A little bit longer over the poor and the poor
In spirit like the Scrooges, who seek three
Spirits to speak so that they can see.
These risky rogues. These reddened lovers
Who grace and grace, who grant and then give
Like gods who go gayly along with
Single-celled existence and our minor
Attempts at terror. What truth I see:
Non-entity enters our Eve as a baby.

:: 58 poems written at 29 years ::

This year, for the 58 @ 29, I plan to focus on alliterative meter. It’s the meter used by Middle English and Old English poets as well as Latin and Greek poets. Basically all epic poets use some form of alliterative meter and it hasn’t been used in English for a thousand years. I will be pulling from the rules offered in Lewis’ article on The Alliterative Meter:

In the general reaction which has set in against the long reign of foreign, syllabic meters in English, it is a little remarkable that few have yet suggested a return to our own ancient system, the alliterative line…. Alliteration is no more the whole secret of this verse than rhyme is the whole secret of syllabic verse. It has, in addition, a metrical structure, which could stand alone, and which would then be to this system as blank verse is the syllabic….

A few successful specimens of alliterative meter would be an excellent answer to the type of critic (by no means extinct) who accuses the moderns of choosing vers libre because they are not men enough for meter. For if syllabic verse is like carving in wood and verse libre like working with a brush, alliterative meter is like carving in granite.

“Vers Libre” for those who don’t know is Latin for “free verse.” Lewis has, ultimately, offered for my poetry just the kind of reaction I prefer in all of my life: a reaction that is, deep down, orthodoxy. A reaction to dead leaves as radical as the radish itself: radical because it is the living root of the thing.

Here is the table of contents for my 58 attempts over the next year. After the monogram, I’m including a quote from Chesterton’s An Apology for Buffoons because it defends proper use of alliteration in English:

58 poems at 29 years old ::

1. Greenwood
2. The Brooklyn Film Festival at Windmill Studios
3. Rio Sunset Park
4. The Ballad of the Writer’s Morning
5. To Jack Across the River
6. To Della Beyond the Veil
7. Guantanamera
8. Mother of Exiles

cover image byTrung Bui Viet