.
On Attending a Holiday Ensemble
with My Wife
We’re gathered in a colleague’s home,
Invited to this performance;
Watching musicians’ fingers roam,
I’m taken to when providence
Crossed mine with Dr. Miller’s part,
He not just wakening my muse,
Stirring a love of every art—
But off to concerts where he’d use
Me as his page-turner, my role
To count black dots (no one would name
It “reading notes”); he’d play a whole
Accompaniment to acclaim.
Back to the moment, the quintet
Before us, Brahms’ Adagio,
The melody from clarinet,
The violins, a lone cello—
Rapt in the present, awed at this
Rich skein of sound drawn from one mind;
While you whisper what we would miss
If players’ parts weren’t each aligned.
.
.
Jeremiah Johnson got his MA in Rhetoric in 2003 and then ran off to China to teach for a decade. His work has appeared in the Sequoyah and Ekphrastic Reviews. He is also currently a teacher of English Composition and World Literature at the University of North Georgia. He lives in Cumming, GA.
The use of the word “skein” was inspired, since as a second definition it involves a tangled arrangement. Knowing when to turn a page for someone playing a complicated arrangement is a skill all to its own. It also means you have one of the best seats, or locations, in the house, being amongst the musicians. Your poem evokes pleasant thoughts with your words and the music being played.
Thank you! I’ve been told by friends (Dr. Miller included) I need to make better use of metaphor in my poems – often times either my entire subject is one, or there are none at all. Am reading The Faerie Queen and seeing one extended metaphor after another is some encouragement.
Regarding page turning, I definitely needed the occasional frantic nod from my professor, but he had holistic interest in me that overlooked the small annoyances 🙂
I really liked the notion of a page-turner as featured artist, but your rhetorical skills far exceeded your metrical skills.
Hi C.B.,
Glad you liked the notion! Regarding the other thought, it makes sense as, one, I did my graduate work in rhetoric, and two, although I’m as much (and really more) a lover of traditional verse as I am of more modern fare, I spent the first 15 years of my poetic output writing solely “free verse”, until I befriended someone who’s taste I greatly respected but who drove me crazy with his insistence that what I was writing wasn’t really poetry. I made my first attempts at iambic pentameter and at a traditional sonnet because of him and now would have a hard time going back to free verse.
On another note, if you have the time to spare, I’d love some constructive feedback from you on my submissions – how you might reword a line or tweak a rhyme. But again, I don’t want to be presumptuous!
Regards,
Jeremiah
Take the second line of the first stanza. How is the reader supposed to scan this? in-VIT-ed to THIS per-FORM-ance or in-VIT-ed TO this per-FORM-ance? Either way there is a hole where there should be a stress. (-ed to and this per-) Now, I approve of metrical substitutions, but in neither instance is an iamb replaced with a pyrrhic foot. Instead a pyrrhic appears ex nihilo, spanning parts of what one would expect to be two iambic feet.
Your friend made a mistake that I used to make before I learned what Lewis Turco had to say about the matter. It’s not that free verse isn’t poetry, it simply isn’t verse. There is nothing wrong, Turco writes, with prose poetry. We have Whitman and the King James Bible as examples. Verse, he says, is measured writing, so “free verse is actually an oxymoron, and “formal verse” is a tautology. Prose and verse are kinds of writing, and poetry is a genre of writing.
Well done, Jeremiah. A nice sentiment about all the parts contributing to a success!
So true, Paul. My wife followed that up with the thought that, while a soloist can stir us, an ensemble adds a depth and richness we can’t attain on our own. And I’m reminded of how C.S. Lewis remarked that he thought it impossible to sustain creative output without feedback of some sort (hence, the Inklings were indispensable to each other).
Nice touch to add depth and richness at the end of the poem with your wife’s feedback! Otherwise we wouldn’t understand your full title. I agree with C. B. Anderson about your rough meter, and I’ll take the next-to-last line for my example.
There, the necessary stresses on words are WHISper and MISS. To get four stresses, we have to read, WHILE you WHISper what WE would MISS. That’s irregular, and the stress on WHILE has no point to it. Why not change to, You WHISper, “How VERy MUCH we MISS/If PLAYers’ PARTS aren’t EACH aLIGNED.” That’s still a bit irregular, but there is a point to giving your wife a speaking (perhaps I should say, a whispering) role, and I think it reads better. Analyze for yourself as you check over the finished poem. It will help!