Occasion: Patriotism
Memorial Day
and Flag Day are commemorative occasions just ripe for a poet. While many are addicted to Open Mic nights,
these public ceremonies will stretch any writer’s abilities.
Now let me add a 3rd:3] manipulate structure to stand out. Poets who do so can provide copies of their poems to participants. It’s like free publicity. “All politics is local”, 1930s newspapermen said, and word-of-mouth is the best marketing.
Also in the
5/5 blog, is a brief contrast of the inaugural poems of Maya Angelou and Robert
Frost. She gives us a poem as sprawling
as American cities while Frost’s “The Gift Outright” is tightly focused and
structured. For the audience, this is
the difference between a 30-minute speech and a 5-minute one.
It’s the
Gettysburg Address that we know and love, not the hour-long speech that
preceded it. (Look for it on June 25.)
Craft the
poem well, and it gains power to reach into the ages.
3 Poems for a Patriotic Occasion
Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier”
Memorial Day
is when we recognize and thank the sacrifice of those who died for the freedoms
we may not deserve.
The sestet
presents the gain and the reason for the sacrifice.
Death
arouses emotion, but Brooke asks us to THINK.
In each stanza, he reminds us of the purpose.
Brooke
himself died in WWI. The Great War to
end all wars, it was called. And it was
not and never will be, as long as human nature is what it is.
Gwendolyn Brooks’ “the sonnet-ballad”
Brooks write
another sonnet but also a ballad, with its three subject matters of love,
betrayal, and death.
As the
speaker mourns her soldier gone, she reminds of the sacrifices of those on the
home front, feeling betrayed by the death of their beloved.
Particular
phrases that haunt us, as the speaker is haunted by her loss, are “my lover’s
tallness” and “an empty heart-cup”, the knowledge that her lover had to “court
/ Coquettish death”, and the powerful opening and closing with the same line,
an obsessive repetition of grief.
Carl Sandburg’s “Grass”
With “Grass”,
Sandburg is experimenting with poetic line.
Austerlitz,
Waterloo, Gettysburg, Ypres, and Verdun:: important battlefields that
slaughtered soldiers, leaving carcasses piled high until they could be
buried. Humanity is stripped away, and
the very indifference of the speaker’s voice only increases the horror.
Just as the
veterans who survive are horrified by those of us who do not understand the
sacrifices that freedom requires.
Of these
three poems, “Grass” reads the most naturally.
Standing at a podium, the natural flow of words is extremely important.
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. ~` John F. Kennedy.
Wrapping Up
On the 15th
of June we look at poems for the occasion of Father’s Day. Join us.
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