20 December 2004. It took me a while, but last night I came up with better beginning lines for the poem on meter and rhyme I've been working on, then added a few more this morning:
The blissed high surge a metrical design
can April into almost any line
is wonderful, and surely merits praise--
as do the least of all the other ways
a poet marshalls sounds to make his words
woods scatteredly lit up with hidden birds.
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I consider this a pretty good poem in the Hopkins/Dylan Thomas mode. I know that when I post it to New-Poetry, the extreme stasguards who think formalism the only or the best kind of poetry will tell me my six lines aren't iambic (look at the first line--three accented syllables in a row right near its beginning!) and grammatically unforgivable. Whether the one who feels metery must be, in his opinion, good to count as poetry will even accept them as poetry is doubtful. I'll wait a bit to find out. I don't consider the lines quite done. "[I]s wonderful" seem pretty weak, to me, for example. I very much like the zip of "words" to "woods," though. (I originally had a preposition between the two words, but then thought it'd be neat to have one right after the other.) The use of "April" as a verb is a tic of mine. I've done it in at least one other poem, and thought to do it in several more, some of which I may finally have done it, I can't remember. I can't think of any other word that works as well as it here yet, though.
Next, I have to get the free verse section of the poem up to snuff. That may take a while, for right now I'm trying to concentrate on finally finishing the book of the mental defects of the people who believe Shakespeare was some noble I started at least fifteen years ago, and have had close to finishing for two or more. I diagram the defects! five more diagrams to make for the chapter I'm on, then just a single chapter left to organize and refine. It may needs diagrams, too, I'm not sure. I'm on a two-week vacation from subbing; my goal is to finish the book before I have to go back to work. (It's important to me not because of the efficiency with which it refutes the Shakespeare skeptics, but because it will put my theory of psychology into print for the first time. That's one of my Life-Works.)
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