PANNING THE POETS OF OLD

ELIZABETH SOLOMON

A Defence of Vers Libre, To Which Is Added a Free Verse Kiss

WHEN it comes to LOVE, the generallyaccepted lever for poetry production, I'm for registering action, or, intrepreting it at least, in a medium of truth-recording capacity, such as, well—free verse. All life is really poetry in a vers libre form. We all dance the new steps, and we all talk the new jargon. The modem dances, compared to the old-time, smoothly rhythmic steps, are as free verse unto the smoothly rhyming, polished, academic poetry of old. The modern one-step, and a few snatches of jargon and slang, make our resume of the day—its twenty-four hours of work and sport (and, sad to say, a little of it wasted in sleep) and the sum total of it all is Free Verse; gorgeous vers libre; staccato and jolty, a gleam of color and beauty, with here and there a touch of the workaday world in it. Free Verse is absolutely true to human nature. If there is any fire or color in us at all, we talk free verse, we walk it, we dance it, we live it.

FOR instance, the telephone rings.

You know pretty positively who it is that is ringing, so you say, mockingly,

"Are you there?" and his voice answers "No, I'm out", and you say "Hurry".

And that's a lyrical moment, and then the sky bums blue above. But it is a moment only, and to give it a full stanza would be to deviate from the essence of truth; so, let us give it only a line; a line of color and thrill and rapture, of rhythmic melody, and tack it right on to the prosiness of signing the cheque for the butcher's bill. Then you'll have real life, real truth, and real free verse!

Life is not a stately epic. It doesn't stalk grandly along in blank verse, not even for half a page. True, there comes a couplet, a measure of it now and then.

You hear it when the "Organ moans her sorrow to the roof," but, hard on the grand diapason conies the clang of the cars, the honk honk of the motor-car, and the traffic cop's shrill whistle.

When you try to paint life in blank verse, or any other academic style, you become artificial and that's very bad form. Ah, me, and alackaday! All life is scrappy and patchy—"On earth the broken arc; in heaven, the perfect round". But what are we going to do about it? I ask you, what?

THE real poets of all the ages died young, frightfully, gloriously, deliriously young. It wasn't the starving in garrets so much as their trying to live up to concert-pitch all the time; struggling to sustain the ecstatic; to retain the rhapsodic, that they might put it all into true rhythmical form.

No wonder they died young!

Not only does the old-fashioned poet die young because of an over long brain-storm, but his readers must also be considered. They get some awful jolts when they go out into this staccato, jolting world of free verse with their heads full of the old-fashioned poets' smooth, romantic, musical version of life.

Don't you remember when you carried a volume of Shelley in your pocket? That was the semester following the one when you read Emerson and had wonderful Platonic friendships with girls. And then, that later period when Omar was your god! Those imagined nights of Eastern sumptuousness; tinkling fountains and castanets, flashing scimitars and beturbaned, dark-skinned, Oriental lovers! Some semester that, when Omar was god! Real poetry, that!

"BUT now we are in a sure-enough free-verse epoch—not a tinkle of fountain or castanet is to be heard anywhere. You can hardly recount real life without dropping into free verse. Expletives and exclamations and groans fit into it so well. They seem to belong. Like all the so-called new things, Free Verse is really as old as the world; it is, elemental and so has always been with us. The cave man talked free verse before he talked anything else; a grunt, a snarl, three words and a sigh, and the cave man became a Vers Librist.

Was Ruskin writing about the sunrise when he wrote "A ray here, a flash there, a shower of jewels everywhere?" He thought he was writing good prose, but it's the finest sort of poetry—in the new form. Put it down this way:

SUNRISE

By Mr. Ruskin

A ray here,

A flash there,

A shower of jewels everywhere,

And

The sun is up!

Speaking of the sun getting up,—do you remember, in your German primer, that little stanza, the literal translation of which is such good vers libre?

Kommt Kinder, wascht die Augen aus,

Es giebt hier was zu sehen,

Und ruft den Yater auch heraus,

Die Sonne vird aufgehen.

And now, will you permit me to append my very special translation—literal translations always form free verse:

Come, children, wash the eyes out,

It is here something to see;

And call the father also here out,

The sun will up go!

THE common, daily grind of life—if done into old-fashioned verse—becomes glossed over with a glamour that never was on land or sea, or in any modem apartment house. If done into prose, unless by a perfect grand-master of life and belles letters, it becomes hard and cold, like a lawyer's brief; but free verse is the perfect medium; all the color and perfume; all the angularity and drabness; the tinsel, tawdriness; the strength and sincerity; the soft, subdued sheen of sentiment; the topic flash of passion, —all is kept intact.

FREE Verse may not be verse but it is certainly free, FREE! And it's great to be free, whether you're a verse or a woman. If you are free—and a woman—you never hear, at seven A. M., from the room beyond, that measured,

masculine voice, colorless, exact and mathematical, like the metallic click of an adding-machine: "ElizaBETH" (accent on the BETH, just as it is printed), "It is seven o'clock. You ought to be up and dressed, with the flame started under the double-boiler wherein the oatmeal jellies. For seven o'clock is my time to step into the tub, and you know, perfectly well, that at precisely 7:30 by Big' and Little Benjamin, and by the Cuckoo too, I step into the dining-room, beautifully groomed, ready for my day at the Bank, and that at exactly 7:31 it is my invariable custom to say, 'This coffee is cold,' although only an instant before I saw you take the current out of the percolator and attach it to the toaster. By being in bed at seven, instead of at the range, you are bound to throw me off my schedule, so that it will be 7:35 before I can say, 'This coffee is cold'—or four minutes late."

To the woman who is free, seven A. M. is merely a glittering, golden, azure promise of a raft of unchartered hours full of unexpected and unscheduled happenings and delights.

That's what freedom means to a woman, and it means just as much to a verse. A Free Verse can be natural; it can say what it means; tell the truth without fear or favor; without measuring or calculating. Life and Death, Sleep and Awakening, Love and Divorce, can all be more adequately pictured in vers libre, because cataclysms only become vocal in a somewhat staccato manner. Let me do you a kiss in a sort of imagistic free verse, and let me ask you, ladies and GENTLEMEN (in caps, Mr. Editor, just as it is printed, I appeal to you), isn't it fairly convincing and realistic?

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(Continued from page 63)

A KISS

Listen!

For I can't say it above a whisper,

So please listen—

I knew you were going to kiss me.

I knew it weeks ago,

Sooner or later,

Some day, some hour,

You'd kiss me—

Glorious ultimate!

But listen,

At least look attentive!

Isn't it funny, I knew it so well,

Knew that you were—going to kiss me?

And I wondered when ? How and where ?

And you really hear every word that I say Tho' you feel as far-away as you look—

Feel smothered in roses and rubies,

Just listen—

Nirvana!

Listen, and tell me,

Is it because you are you Or because I am I,

Or because you kiss every girl that you know? None of these reasons you acknowledge?

And it's all just because—

I knew you were going to kiss me—

And you did—

Again-and again-!