Poetics and Ruminations

My Lyric Twin

My habit of using pen-names for some of my published work is of long-standing. I have a dim recollection, if it’s a memory at all, of using an alias on some of my earliest publications in The Bell, the school newspaper of Suffield Academy in Suffield, Connecticut, which I attended in the eighth and ninth grades (1947-49). Certainly I was using aliases in Meriden High School, also in Connecticut, where I wrote poems for Lydia Atkinson’s Wednesday morning “Pennons of Pegasus” poetry column in The Morning Record. One of them was “El Turco,” a play on my first initial, and another was “Della Diabolo.” There may have been others.

Des Imagistes

Of the five levels of poetry — the typographical, or visible level; the sonic, or level of language music; the sensory, or emotional level; the ideational, or thematic level, and the fusional, or architectonic level — it was the third that Ezra Pound in 1912 decided was primary. On the sensory level patterns of imagery — figurative language, tropes — come to the fore, and the five external senses of taste, touch, sight, smell, and hearing are expressed, as is the internal "sense" of emotion. However, for this last "sense" would be substituted an "idea," the "objective correlative" of T. S. Eliot, which was nothing more than the "vehicle" or object of a metaphor, for if one were to choose exactly the right "object" (read "image") and place it in the perfect language context, that object would correlate with the "tenor" or subject of the metaphor, an idea or a thought which need not even be mentioned in the poem because it would be contained in the image itself.

Iraq and a Hard Place

The man on the ground is Petraeus,
A soldier who may not dismay us
Until, with a sigh,
He rolls out the lie
He’s bound to roll out to betray us.