Last book read – Like a lot who are doing this meme, I’ve got a few concurrently on the go. There’s the one above [I’m excerpting my other blog with this. Check there for full.]. I’m still working thru and P K Page’s Hologram homage and Under Tuscan Sun and resavoring With Issa. I might have to just buy my own copy of that last one so the library can get theirs back. A sample of Nelson Ball’s With Issa,
GOING ON
Blue
sky
bird
fly
sun
set
earth
turn
This looks simple and is and isn’t.
The first pair is an adjective and a noun, the last 3 stanzas are noun and an action. That sets the first off grammatically from the rest, the last 3 being 3 of a kind. It puts the poem off center instead of in easy halved balance.
The images can group and regroup in many ways by how the chosen words are drawn together by their shapes, sounds, ideas or placement. If it were set on the page differently, the weight of each word would be different. For example,
Blue sky, a bird flies.
Sun sets and earth turns
This would be quite another type of utterance. It would be a ho-hum descriptive of a particular present time and bird when we don’t happen to know the species name.
As is, there’s something more essential set up in the choice words. There’s the consonance of blue and bird, the rhyme of sky and fly that with the slowness of line break doesn’t feel like cutesy couplet.
The motion when you cross stanzas of what is side by side makes another set of seeing the scene, going on blue, sky bird, fly sun, set earth, turn, going on blue… makes a sort of reflection or verbal counterpart to the cycles of bird wheeling and earth and sun turning. The poem does a repeating cycle within itself of stillness of only sky, a new part of motion, a bird’s flight, stop for day and sun pausing and then earth rolling on.
The pairing of sun and earth as the basic minimal forms matched with the set of stillness of set and turn in motion.
We are in the pared essentials here. The set and sun are a match in consonants while the earth and turn match in vowels in slant rhyme.
If he chose to use sun rise instead of sunset the ideas would be regrouped so that there would be more tethers between sky, fly and rise. All would be with a sense of motion instead of the sun being solid and coming to a hidden stillness. The sky might be the constant one but by being blue and us knowing it doesn’t stay blue, there would be more a sense of being transitory.
Visually, and perhaps to some accents, there’s almost a closing couplet of slant rhyme of sun and turn that echoes the first shape of first two stanzas with the y that pair off. I wonder why he capitalized the first B so it doesn’t pair off with the other b to package the two stanzas neatly into two ascenders of b, two descenders of y. Would it be too even and self-containing and close it off from the 2nd half of the poem?
The very boom-boom matched pair of stressed S words gives a solidity that doesn’t happen with “sun rise” or worse, “sun rises” adding a two syllable word to the mix. It would add a tension, an off-centredness perhaps but in the tiny scale of the images, it would be almost a stage whisper to add another syllable, especially there where it wouldn’t balance physically with the title that has its own internal tension in context. The title is present continuous, which is repeated habit, or right now, yet at the same time the poem is speaking to something which is also out of time and eternal scale.
The little poem is calming in its simplicity and yet makes the brain wheel at how easily a different word or spacing could throw off the effect.