About making love Hemingway said, “It’s always the same but always different.” Poets might say the same about how they write.

I carry with me 3X5 cards to write down a line when it comes unannounced. Capturing those fugitive lines matters because they don’t last long.

Once, in a movie theater, a line came, and I wrote it down even though I couldn’t see in the dark. When I got home the card was blank: I had written with the wrong end of the pen. Like Mickey Spillane at a crime scene, I shaded the impression with a pencil, and that lost line eventually made it into a poem.

When the cards pile up I copy them into journal books, which, in my case, go back to 1986 (although I was writing, or learning to write, poems 20 years before that). But the journals are more than a repository. In Part 2 of this essay, I’ll explain how.

If a line feels like it could turn into a poem I start a file of drafts. In a couple of drawers like this one, the history of each poem comes to rest.

Mss

Since I start things on the margin
 — cocktail napkins, cancelled checks,
timetables trying to be reliable — 
and since I save it all, I know
there are good words buried and lost
in those fat accordion files, words
that sounded good at the time,
that I promised to get back to,
rhyme trains that never left Grand Central,
monikers that chattered like silverware
at 30,000’, sounds struck
sheer of sense — coin of a realm — 
from a currency of air, pronounced
like blessings on an express world,
soul puffs, plain mistakes,
angels, working definitions of.

Many creatures populate my new book, The Boxer of Quirinal, but today I’m thinking of the singularly impressive albatross. For your reading pleasure, I have included my poem, “Albatross,” below. I have also included my commentary, which originally appeared in the free-to-download Reader’s Companion.

Albatross

For its first five years the bird does not return to land.

Home is not land’s end,
a fledgling nest
of food and rest.

Home is the wind
you glide, the sea
you glean unendingly

until a hunger comes
to Wheel and Go
not Home

but what you can’t yet know:
the clambering of kind
on kind.

Commentary on Albatross

The albatross is a bird of legend. It carries the souls of drowned sailors. It brings bad luck to any who kill one. Here’s Coleridge in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”:

Ah! Well a-day! What evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.

Modern science finds the albatross equally remarkable. It has the largest wingspan of any bird — more than 10 feet. It mates for life and once it leaves its natal nest, it spends its life in flight over the Southern ocean waves, never landing for years at a time. It returns to the headlands of its birth only to mate, and no one knows how it finds that place.

I’ve been wondering why no one is writing verse drama these days. Writing stage plays in verse is as old as literature itself. For the ancient Greeks and the Elizabethans, verse drama was the only drama. Think of Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus. Think of Shakespeare and Marlowe. All of them wrote their plays in metrical verse. It was not until Ibsen and Modernism that staged plays settled into prose. Since then poetry and stage drama have continued to thrive but separately, not as a hybrid art. While opera, another hybrid art, continues to reinvent itself, why is the place for verse drama a vacant niche?

To be fair, it’s not completely vacant. Our major Modernist poets have written verse dramas through the past century (Yeats, Eliot, Robert Lowell, Archibald MacLeish, Wilbur’s translations of the classic French theater), but their principal metier was always lyric poetry. And our major playwrights stick to prose.

Writing poems and writing plays are kindred activities in the literary arts, but they’re not the same thing. A poem tells us what it has to say. We the listeners hear a single voice speaking, that of the poet (or sometimes the poet through a persona). In contrast a play shows us, through characters acting on one another — colliding and bouncing off each other like bumper cars.

The field of action for a lyric poem is interior reality, the action takes place within the poet’s mind. A play where no action happens, on the other hand, is dead on arrival. For the proof of that pudding, imagine a play without deaths and entrances, arguments and love affairs, exits and alarums. Now imagine a poet up there on the stage talking at us for two hours, and ask yourself if that would be a play. A successful playwright generates action from moment to moment, agile as a moviemaker, to stave off the natural impatience of a live audience. (“The question is,” says David Mamet, “can you put the asses in the seats and keep the asses in the seats? That’s not me, that’s Aristotle. I’ve forgotten the Greek for it.”). To succeed, verse drama must serve two masters. It has to work as poetry and it has to work as drama on the stage.

One possible explanation for the vacant niche: The nature of the plays has changed. Shakespeare wrote his plays in blank verse but also in occasional prose, and there is a pattern. The blank verse, as the more elevated speech, is used by the high-born, the aristocrats and royalty. The low-born characters, the commoners, speak in prose. The same could be said of Greek drama: The gods and heroes speak in poetry. In modern drama there are no gods and few heroes. And so the muse, perched on the playwright’s shoulder, whispers: This should be in prose.

Poetry and personal responsibility has always been a troubling issue for me — and for anyone, I think, who tries to reconcile the lives of poets with their poems. But when Shelley proclaimed poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” he was raising the stakes. (Shelley was presumably using “legislators” in the high sense of statesmanship, and not in the sense used by Mark Twain when he wrote: “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”) Shelly was going beyond the self-knowledge and the interior reality that are the province of the lyric poem, to claim for poets a role in how all of us should live and conduct ourselves in the world of external reality. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton — all the epicists who were concerned with proper human conduct as exemplified by their heroes — would have agreed with Shelley. So, I think, would poets of the Poundian model who would use poetry as their lever to move the world. Yeats, and other poets who see poetry’s role as expressing the world but not running it, would not.

There is no right or wrong to these roles, but there is a corollary. Poets who assume this second, public responsibility as our moral legislators should ensure that they have earned the right to do so. They can earn it by paying at least as much attention to how they live as to what they write. As a Zen tea master, long before the ceremony of making tea, prepares the garden for his guests, sweeps the walk, cleans and composes the room, so poets should give their first attention to the lives they lead. If they do, they will acknowledge the effects of how they live on what they write — a subject that seems to me greatly under-recognized today. And, as a voice of our conscience, they will have established a basis to answer for the effects of what they write on how their readers live.

It’s the stuff of bad dreams. It comes to us again with the second Titanic sinking. There is no such punishment in Dante’s Inferno, but it lives in other poems. And it goes to sea with every sailor.

The Wreck of the Thresher
By William Meredith

(Lost at Sea, April 10, 1963)

I stand on the ledge where rock runs into the river
As the night turns brackish with morning, and mourn the drowned.
Here the sea is diluted with river; I watch it slaver
Like a dog curing of rabies. Its ravening over,
Lickspittle ocean nuzzles the dry ground.
(But the dream that woke me was worse than the sea’s gray
Slip-slap; there are no such sounds by day.)

This crushing of people is something we live with.
Daily, by unaccountable whim
Or caught up in some harebrained scheme of death,
Tangled in cars, dropped from the sky, in flame,
Men and women break the pledge of breath:
And now under water, gone all jetsam and small
In the pressure of oceans collected, a squad of brave men in a hull.

(Why can’t our dreams be content with the terrible facts?
The only animal cursed with responsible sleep,
We trace disaster always to our own acts.
I met a monstrous self trapped in the black deep:
All these years, he smiled, I’ve drilled at sea
For this crush of water. Then he saved only me.)

We invest ships with life. Look at a harbor
At first light: with better grace than men
In their movements the vessels run to their labors
Working the fields that the tide has made green again;
Their beauty is womanly, they are named for ladies and queens,
Although by a wise superstition these are called
After fish, the finned boats, silent and submarine.
The crushing of any ship has always been held
In dread, like a house burned or a great tree felled.

I think of how sailors laugh, as if cold and wet
And dark and lost were their private, funny derision
And I can judge then what dark compression
Astonishes them now, their sunken faces set
Unsmiling, where the currents sluice to and fro
And without humor, somewhere northeast of here and below.

(Sea-brothers, I lower to you the ingenuity of dreams,
Strange lungs and bells to escape in; let me stay aboard last -
We amend our dreams in half-sleep. Then it seems
Easy to talk to the severe dead and explain the past.
Now they are saying, Do not be ashamed to stay alive,
You have dreamt nothing that we do not forgive.
And gentlier, Study something deeper than yourselves,
As, how the heart, when it turns diver, delves and saves.)

Whether we give assent to this or rage
Is a question of temperament and does not matter.
Some will has been done past our understanding,
Past our guilt surely, equal to our fears.
Dullards, we are set again to the cryptic blank page
Where the sea schools us with terrible water.
The noise of a boat breaking up and its men is in our ears.
The bottom here is too far down for our sounding;
The ocean was salt before we crawled to tears.

Source: Poetry Foundation.

Photo Credit: Brian Emery.

I’m writing with something to celebrate: Over 5,000 readers have added The Boxer of Quirinal to their to-read list on Goodreads! The reviews have also begun rolling in. Here is a selection of them:

On Goodreads:

Mallory: “This was an interesting book of poetry … I think my favorite was the series of poems called The South China Sea. The imagery tied with storytelling was great.”

Greg: “I am by no means knowledgeable about poetry, just a guy who likes to read a lot in a wide variety of genres … My absolute favorite, the one I want on my tombstone, is The Library at Innerpeffray (pg. 28).”

On Amazon:

Brian: “The poems in Barr’s The Boxer of Quirinal cover a wide range of subjects … But a clear and urgent theme unites these poems: the theme of survival. What’s more, Barr’s use of language is rich and masterful … This is a book you’ll want to reread again and again.”

Macy: “John Barr has woven a brilliant patchwork of poems that sing, together, of survival. He tells diverse stories - of the Civil War, of a heron, and even of life while his brother is in hospice - with mesmerizing economy, precision, and sharpness. The Boxer of Quirinal is a beautifully balanced and urgent book. Reading it felt soul-enriching. I highly recommend it.”

On The VVA Veteran:

Bill: “The poems in The Boxer of Quirinal deal with life and death in the natural world as well as in conflicts created by humans … John Barr creates … thoughtful poetry that will challenge you at every turn.”

If you have purchased and read The Boxer of Quirinal, would you please take a moment to review the book on your preferred platform? I am also hosting a Goodreads Giveaway if you’d like an opportunity to win a free copy to review!