"Opening Shot" [by David Lehman]

Marsh Hawk Press has sponsored the wonderful Chapter One project, brief memoirs "on becoming a poet,"  a new chapter each month, with contributions from Denise Duhamel, Phillip Lopate, Eileen Tabios, Jane Hirshfield, Burt Kimmelman, Sandy McIntosh, and other redoubtable writers. My own contribution is entitled "Opening Shot" and is the project's choice for October 2019. Section two of five bears the part title "A Pair of Odes," and follows:

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When I was seventeen, I wrote two poems that eventually were published. Both consisted of four lines. To both I gave the title “Ode.” I had never heard of Horace or Pindar and didn’t know what went into the making of an ode as composed by Jonson, Marvell, Gray, Shelley, or Keats. But the word was lovely and in the atmosphere of the 1960s it was okay to break rules, even to be ignorant of what they were.

The first of the odes to be written appeared in a broadsheet published by the poet John Fuller in Oxford, England, summer 1968:

                        I asked a fat man,
                        Do you enjoy being fat?
                        Yes, he said,
                        that is the only thing that I enjoy.

It pleased me that the last line of this simple poem scanned perfectly as iambic pentameter, as if to demonstrate that it is the natural flow of the English language – what we today might call the default meter.

The second ode made a hit with Columbia University radicals during the campus strike of spring 1968, perhaps because it made people laugh when I read it aloud:

                       As long as I live,
                       there shall never be
                       another Harry
                       Truman.

What made me break up the lines as I did? What made me think that these were poems? I don’t know the answer to these and other legitimate questions except to say that I let instinct guide me where it will, and in the end, instinct is what we have to fall back on.
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For more about the project, click here.  For more of my own piece, for example the sections entitled "Whitman in the Eleventh Grade" and  "Frankly. . . you're okay," click here. Photo credit: Catherine Arra.

https://marshhawkpress.org/david-lehman/

Comments

[Amy Allara]

What a great project, and lovely to read some early poems, and thoughts----