NaWUPoBo, #22
In this poem, which is step away from the more direct Nurse Aide Sonnets I have been working on, I picked a slang term for our tradition, "old skool," something about as common from the Hip-Hop lexicon as you can get. I wanted an almost cliched phrase, something anyone who has not rendered themselves deaf and dumb to popular culture could at least make a wild guess at. And that's the whole point of New Formalism, I believe. To breath life into Form, since all poetry is required to take a form in one manner or other.
The poets of the Sixties who thought they had thrown Form out the window with so many other of their nihilistic exercises1 might not agree but really, shouldn't we be welcoming all forms of poetry into our worlds, not barring some from the gate? As The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetic states on page 835:
However … having rejected old forms [Modernists] had no choice but to invent new ones in order to go on at all: there is no escape from form and the reaction to form can only be expressed in another set of forms; for not to have form is not to have any means by which to express the reaction one wants to articulate. No Form, No Speech.
Free verse is … so more or less artificial than the traditional metered verse; the choice of any form is a priori the same: the choice of form. And, in time, with the old attitudes and old moralities manifestly gone … poets discovered they could return to traditional forms once again, forms which a generation of poets who came of age in the Sixties never knew.
The day that some major recording label puts out a CD of Hip-Hop sonnets will be a sad day for most poets who work only in written form. Disco sonnets? Gangsta' sonnets? Pimp-wannbe sonnets? Imagine, a whole nation of kids grooving to Funk sonnets. It almost makes one want to roll out of bed in the morning to see which way the popular culture weather vane is turning today.
"Old Skool" means nothing to so many who
reads this and yet you have witnessed the roots
doctor, old master of some sort, who blew
across the page, calming the trees, the brutes,
the stars into order. You witnessed what
tradition is, the reason you are here,
both as singer and healer. This sonnet
is proof that there is so much we still jeer
and gibe at, simply because it sounds strange.
"Old Skool" means nothing to many and yet
how poor is our music, how dim our range
to cut out so much? The terrible debt
we owe others making our notes richer,
wilder, making us beastly and queerer.
- I recall one of the members of Jefferson Airship saying he had "tried bathing, man, but it was too bourgeoisie" for him. I think that sums up the nostalgia of Sixties nicely, don't you? And back when I was a wee Zachary and thought playing loud music was a form of political protest I would crank up my crappy Sex Pistols' Never Trust a Hippy LP, thinking I was doing something profound. [back]