Poetry Friday: Throwback

I stumbled across some old poetry the other day.  I wrote these back in high school for my freshman literature class.  Our poetry unit asked that we write three different forms of poetry: one, where we set up our own meter pattern; another, to write a haiku, and third, to write a limerick. As I have no pride whatsoever in the limerick I wrote, I present you with the first two assignments

The Fairy
(c) A.L.S. Vossler

Tinkling, sparkling in the air;
Magic follows everywhere.
The flow'rs all bloom with radiance bright
When comes the fairy of the night.
To life the world springs, when she sings
Then flies away on silv'ry wings. 

Even at fourteen, I had an obsession with all things fantasy.  At the time I was really into elves and fairies.  Now, this was sort of inspired by Tolkien's poem "Goblin Feet" (not connected with the Middle-Earth milieu).  However, most of the word choices were because a), it had the correct number of syllables, or b), it rhymed. 

The Storm

(c) A.L.S. Vossler

Endless skies bleed rain

Clouds cast shadows; eerie ghosts
Lightning rends earth's vault.

 

This one, unsurprisingly, I wrote on a rainy day.  

Poetry is one of those things where no matter how simplistic it is, people try to impose a lot of meaning on it.  Case in point, William Carlos Williams.  Oh, the critics love to break it down and explicate the hell out of his works. Reading literary criticism of poetry always makes me think of Billy Collins' famous quote:

"All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means." 

I am personally guilty of the new critic/formalist approach to poetry--I so love the words themselves that I find myself waxing a little toward the Archibald MacLeish "Ars poetica" camp.  However, I don't pretend for a moment that formalism is enough to properly interpret any given work. I do like to borrow from many critical camps--and I am quite guilty of beating poems with hoses. 

 Now, I am no enormous fan of Williams' poetry, but I find the desperate attempts of critics to understand it hilarious.  Maybe we should just appreciate it for what it is and let it "be palpable and mute / As a globed fruit"(MacLeish 1-2)...

Sorry, sorry.  The Ars Poetica thing again.  I just laugh to think that someday, some rabidly reader-response critic who puts Stanley Fish to shame or some delightfully vicious deconstructionist or enthusiastic feminist critic is going to get a hold of a simple poem I wrote as a naive teenager.  It's pretty amusing actually.  

And people wonder why Coleridge felt the need to explain his works and put marginal glosses in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"?  Talk about foresight.  And we still tear apart his works and even his letters and glosses.  

So, anyway, this literary tirade is partly to make up for the fact that I won't be posting again until next week.  

If you care to offer any reader-response or deconstructionist or feminist criticism, please do so in the comments.  I especially enjoy deconstruction.  

Works cited (please forgive the lack of proper MLA format, I am short on time today.)

Macleish, Arichibald. "Ars Poetica." 

Billy Collins quote