Gregory Corso’s “For Miles”

Your sound is faultless
      pure & round
           holy
     almost profound

Your sound is your sound
      true  & from within
      a confession
      soulful & lovely

Poet whose sound is played
      lost or recorded
      but hear
      can you recall that 54 night at the Open Door
      when you & bird
      wailed five in the morning some wondrous
      yet unimaginable score

_____

Notice:

1. how he repeats the long “o” in the first and last lines of each stanza. He isn’t doing it randomly. He throws many more long “o” s in there, but those two or three anchor everything.

2. He uses “sound” multiple times. It’s ok to repeat a word, as long as it fits.

3. He lets the words carry the sound; he doesn’t needlessly embellish anything. This is an example of a poem that paints both a visual picture and carries the reader’s mind with the sound of the words.

Here is a breakdown of a poem that I could not wait to share with you all. This is Streams and Rivulets, published in Engine(idling, Issue #9 a few days ago. The issue required “collaboration” with another poet. reached out to me, and we ran with it.

Quick Note: If you could support both of us by nominating it for the Readers’ Choice Awards, that would make our day. The form is HERE

This poem holds one big trick, and several smaller ones. Firstly, it reads as three poems in total. The left poem, the right poem, and the WHOLE poem. It reads fully across left to right, as a contrapuntal. A poetic conversation between two voices that reads as a contiguous poem. What I wanted to share here is the movement of the poem, as one of the many things that this work does. How poems move our eyes towards a specific place, and our hearts to a specific space. There are three major emotional movements that take place in this poem. See a little hand-drawn representation.

1. The blue arrow going down is the hypo-arousal or depressional movement downward. When we read poems, we read them from top to bottom. There is an emotional space here of remembrance about a moment that includes hydrangeas and an old relationship.

2. The red arrow going across is the hyper-arousal or anger movement across. We read poems left to right, and there is a progression of emotion from sad to angry here. The voices change and mix between poems, as there is a sort of call and response. It’s the movement into the heightened arousal of the second voice.

3. The Green Arrow going diagonal represents the Growth Arc. This poem adds a dimension of trans-relational growth through the lens of memory. We both hurt, we both burn with anger, but we both move through this experience, and by the end of the poem you can almost feel the catharsis of having left it behind. One voice is sweating in the heat of the memory, the other is screaming in the stillness.

The other thing I want to draw your attention to is the pairing of syllabic line matching and lyrically focused slant rhyme. JC does a wonderful job of matching the first poem, with most of the lines being within 1-2 syllables of the line it’s responding to. Examples:

“ounce of will | powerless swill” (3/4)

“be cut for bouquets | be cut for decay” (5/5)

“forget beads of sweat, try streams and rivulets | forget needs, intent. Try screams, regret” (11/9)

With the help of ’s sharp editing skills, we were able to match lyrical lines with each other; matching subject, rhyme schema, and syllables all in the same lines.

That is very hard to do. I am so proud of the work I did here, and how, when I added it to the work others did, it was launched into the stratosphere by the talent, dedication, and passion of people that I have met on Substack! Truly, this represents (to me) one of the most wonderful aspects of this community. It helped me get my first-ever published poem.

-JNG

I came across an interview with Ethan Hawke in 2023 that most artists have probably encountered (if they’ve doom-scrolled social media for any given period of time). I wanted to pull a paragraph from that interview that struck me. The video is here.

He says this:

Most people don’t spend a lot of time thinking about poetry, they have a life to live and they’re not really concerned with Allen Ginsberg’s poems or anybody’s poems. Until... their father dies, you go to a funeral, you lose a child, somebody breaks your heart, they don’t love you any more and all of a sudden you’re desperate for making sense out of this life and “has anybody felt this bad before, how did they come out of this cloud?”

Or the inverse, something great. You meet somebody and your heart explodes, you love them so much you can’t even see straight ... and that’s when art’s not a luxury, it’s sustenance

We treat art as a luxury we can rarely afford to give time to on a daily basis.

I have found sustenance in poetry, the reading of it, the writing of it, the thinking in it.

One of my dear friends has a story that I like to share. He had just ended a multi-year serious relationship with a girl named Grace. The future seemed a touch bleak, and he was struggling with ways to work through his emotions and grief. He wasn’t an avid reader of poetry, and he came across a poem (randomly) by Robert Hass: Faint Music.

The first line of the poem is, “Maybe you need to write a poem about Grace.” He felt gutted and seen at the same time. Good poetry has this sense of kairos that breaks through any scientific explanation of it.

-JNG

Today I want to break down Frank O’Hara’s famous poem “Steps.” This is a bite-sized editorial to introduce ideas rather than to deep dive. Some poets will balk at the idea of a scansion breakdown of a free verse poem. Hold my beer. We will largely just focus on the first two lines of the poem.

First, read the poem:

_______________________________________________________________

Steps

How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left

here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days
(I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still
accepts me foolish and free
all I want is a room up there
and you in it
and even the traffic halt so thick is a way
for people to rub up against each other
and when their surgical appliances lock
they stay together
for the rest of the day (what a day)
I go by to check a slide and I say
that painting’s not so blue

where’s Lana Turner
she’s out eating
and Garbo’s backstage at the Met
everyone’s taking their coat off
so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers
and the park’s full of dancers with their tights and shoes
in little bags
who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y
why not
the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we’re all winning
we’re alive

the apartment was vacated by a gay couple
who moved to the country for fun
they moved a day too soon
even the stabbings are helping the population explosion
though in the wrong country
and all those liars have left the UN
the Seagram Building’s no longer rivalled in interest
not that we need liquor (we just like it)

and the little box is out on the sidewalk
next to the delicatessen
so the old man can sit on it and drink beer
and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day
while the sun is still shining

oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

_______________________________________________

This is a ragtime rush of New York’s daily moments. He uses informal metrical palindromes and end-stops with similar syllables to achieve his own feel.

Lines 1 and 2 are:

“How funny you are today, New York / like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime.” New York and swingtime are unrelated yet also metrical cousins because of their syllabic cadence.

Notice how the stresses match the subject topic (something O’Hara is wildly famous for, and good at doing).

“How funny you are today, New York”

You could mark it:

/ = stressed
x = unstressed

/x /x x x x / / /

A rising accumulation of emphasis that breaks for the proper nouns.

“like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime”

Approximate stresses:

x GIN | ger RO | gers in | SWINGtime

x / x / x x /

The rhythm becomes lighter and more dance-like, which is fitting given the reference. You can do this for the entirety of the poem, and it’s good practice! See how the stresses validate or cause friction with the topic of the line.

On a topical note, he can utilize current events and celebrity names easily, without falling into the trap that some poets fall into, which is writing reactionary or political poetry that will not stand the test of time. Part of the reason why I like this poem is that my parents made me watch black-and-white movies growing up, so I feel a kinship in knowing the names and faces of the celebrities he mentions. That isn’t the case for all readers, and I recognize that.

He gives us a slice-of-life diorama that seems to almost keep going even after the poem ends. The hurried caffeine and nicotine-infused rush in the end 5 lines - not only makes sense with his free-verse narrative of a day in New York, but it also lends a lens to the rest of the poem. A sort of frenetic energy that pervades the attitude of the author’s day. That could only be accomplished through this particular form and freedom. He embodies his mood through the poems' enjambment and lack of capitalization in lines.

It’s almost as if the speaker is fumbling, stuttering, and rushing to speak through their own heightened and golden retriever-like mood. It is yet another example of how narrative free verse poetry can beckon readers to remember when they themselves have occupied similar spaces. Frenzied rushes of love and appetite that usually come on the heels of life stages that include less-than-healthy sleep schedules. O’Hara shamelessly includes the qualifiers “too much” and “too many” in a recognition that this rush isn’t healthy at all, but frankly, it’s all that he has currently in front of him. He is willing to live the free-spirit manifesto bare-chestedly, in full clarity of what others think of it.

Have you ever been standing in the grocery store, in front of the eggs…and all of the sudden…a raging anti-capitalist monologue comes careening into your head? Just me? Ok.

Sometimes I am going about my day, or my week, or my year, and an energy from another place, past or future, swoops in and transports me somewhere else.

We live in a physical world, but alongside us are emotional and spiritual things happening at the same time. Our brains and bodies are aware of them even if we can't put our finger on them.

I’m pushing my son on the swing, and he's yelling HIGHER DAD, and within milliseconds, I am the one being pushed on the swing, yelling the same thing to my dad. I am two places at once, and feeling the deep significance of it all.

Portal poems start with the mundane and lead with a trigger. They aren't completely memory-based, however. There is a string that attaches the memories, which is closer to the core than the simple similarities between the memories. A feeling of freedom, wholeness, nostalgia (something lost), or grief. The transportation is simple, the overflow of uncommunicated and unrecognized tethers to the realm beyond the physical. Because while our day and our week are an accumulation of simple physical acts and happenings, it actually is so much more (as we are aware).

We rush through life at a pace that ignores how connected things really are. We use words like “irony,” “fate,” and “coincidence” to allow ourselves freedom from having to face how sometimes greater realities are staring us in the face every day.

Ok - that's my philosophy tirade. Now let's talk about HOW to write a good portal poem.

1) Conjure a memory or pick a random event from your week.

2) What were you feeling? What spaces were you inhabiting in that moment? Parenting? Exercise? Contemplation? Eating?

3) Where was your mind whilst you did this? Were you distracted? Checked out? Zoned in? Unaware? (You can cheat and even bring in information you now know that you didn't then!)

4) When else in your life have you felt this?

5) How old did you feel? Old? Young? A teenager?

6) Now bring back a physical reality to the lines and check back in with your body. Where were you holding all this?

7) What other truths does this reveal about you? Are you always like this? What does this reveal about what you want from life? What happened in this single instance of transportation?

This is all just the beginning of Portal Poems. I could write another ten pages, but I have to go to bed. Sorry.

For more reading, I would encourage you to read one of these:

Baseball Canto by Ferlinghetti

Marriage by Gregory Corso

Wind and Water by Gerald Stern

Stay Frosy,

JNG

I moved around my car
and the black towhee
rushed off, thinking only 
of predators and
bird things. But how could I?
With my twenty overweight pounds 
in the paunch my mom 
scolded me for since ten.
Three leg surgeries and the rod
in my shin below
my closed-off mind, 
even my heavy rockish heart,
always aching and grunting for more of this,
less of that. 

It can't just be the bones that are light
in the Birds. Can it?
All the organs, the mind, and finally, the arms 
must know how to swoop
the wind underneath them, how to bank and to turn, 
how to flare hair before landing.
All of this must be learned. 

_____

Damn, I really like this one. Maybe I will submit it somewhere after some editing.

-JNG

East! East!

And the Cananites always go east. 
And the wind of God always blows.
And what use is wistfulness when
grovelling will do just fine. 

And the ground never coughs up the dead.
And the poor always shiver at night.
And why do we huddle together
to share the warmth of our bodies. 

Have you ever considered, 
this isn't the season of pain?
But rather the infinite reign
of the movements of East!

We moved out of Eden
to find our own way.
This isn't the season of beating.
An easterly wind blows today.

A duel: everywhere, on every street corner,
separated by a few cents in price.
Every dad born between 1960 and 1980
looks out the window and says obsessively,
God, the price of gas is high,
while they visit their favorite massage parlor nearby.

An alter to appetitive fetishization.
Same place we go for vehicle fuel, sure.
That's a great idea—fuel the dragon and the stomach.
Ancient hunger dressed in polyester
Plato's appetites just threw up
at the sight of such fluorescent light
beamed down on all that soda.
Even a Roman augur couldn't predict
The ritual of filling the tank, 
not even if he saw seven crows flying from left to right
As he stepped down from the pillar’d mount

satisfying himself before God 
and on the face of some Temple prostitute. 

This is a poem I wrote last year for a writing program, and it seems like it doesn’t fit with the tenor of what I am submitting, or the chapbook I am compiling, so I figured I would put it out here. The imagery is stark, and it veers from the surrealist mental reflection that I navigate towards. It’s sort of a fresh difference from the forms I normally write, but man, the attitude is still there.

-JNG

And I saw a field
of green grass 
as wide as the sky
with nothing 
except a fence re-
-ceding, a 
child, a speck in the 
distance do-
ing cartwheels.

Nothing spectacular this week - a nice 5/3 stomp. My Substack posts are basically just a way to keep me accountable. I write so much and edit so little that it forces me to pull something from what I wrote and put it out there. Stay frosty.

After Ilya Kaminsky

I was a child in church, week after week, 
multiple days per week, just studying scripture and 
learning who was good and who was bad, 
and how there was way more bad than good.
Then why the heck were 
there ninety-nine safe sheep?
We woke up early because 
they threw three services 
I just want to go home and sleep.
In the pew of America, in the Church of America.
I took my jacket and walked out during the music. 
In the two hundred and fiftieth year of the reign 
in the House of Christianity. 
We protested, but not enough. 
We lived happily.
We enjoyed a Christian Nation.

The Slant of Albert Camus

And in the end...
No in the middle, infact
I gave up and switched 
from sitting on the couch 
to laying in
a much more mentally exposed 
sort of way and had that quote
by Camus bounding between my ears
"If anyone had opened his arms to me,
I would have wept like a child"
For children lay on couches 
much more than adults do
and I closed both eyelids, 
interfacing with the world outside
through sound and sound alone 
for only five minutes or was it six 
while my sandwich digested and I
could almost feel the dirt being thrown 
on top of my coffin even though
it was decades before I would die. 

That restful sleep, with no waking. 
With nothing but the smell of balsomwood
or pine or red cedar or some other tree
that endured the axe so I may finally sleep
and in that sleep know wholeness like
the moment when I was born. Completing every 
position my body and mind had yet to take. 

God, that popcorn ceiling looks awful at this slant.

Section 1: A Breakdown of Terms

This article has been brewing in my mind for a few months now.

I love reading poetry. More than reading it, I love tasting it. But for me to enjoy the taste of something, I had to be able to distinctly pick out familiar and unfamiliar notes and aromas.

Most people think of the poetic practice of Scansion simply as breaking down a line into stressed and unstressed syllables (rhyme and meter). While technically correct, that is only the beginning.

With the introduction of Slant Ryhme, we now have new ways Scansion can be applied (analyzing matching dipthongs, gutturals, dentals, sibilance, and more).

When I first started writing poetry, I didn’t know what most of these words meant, so let me define them here (for the uninitiated, veterans, you can skip ahead to section II).

a) Diphthongs: The sound two vowels make when placed next to each other.

b) Gutturals: Just like they sound, the sounds are low and deep in the back of the throat.

c) Dentals: The sound made whenever your tongue touches the back or top/bottom of your teeth.

d) Sibilance: Hissing or sharp sounds made by "s," "sh," "ch," "z," and "zh"

e) Informal Rhyme: Words that don’t formally rhyme, but rhyme all the same (think of simple examples like how “do” rhymes with “crew.”

f) Onomonopia: Words that match how the actual thing sounds. Sizzle, bang, meow.

g) Consonance: the repetition of identical or similar consonant sounds in nearby words, typically within or at the end of words.

h) Assonance: Often called vowel rhyming. Think "Round about the keel with faces pale" from Lord Alfred Tennyson’s The Lotus Eaters

i) Alliteration: Most people know this one. It’s when you start words with the same sound or letter. E.g., “Frustratingly Frugal.”

Section II: Beyond Simple Word Pairings

Certain line lengths and pairings create certain feelings. Everyone is so quick to point out that Iambic is the “natural length of breath” for humans, but I have found that it stops there. I haven’t seen many breakdowns of the emotions other meters can bring.

A non-formal meter can give the poem a life, a motif, or a personality that draws the reader into a space they weren’t previously inhabiting.

Like William Blake’s classic “Tyger Tyger burning bright.” Trochaic catalexis, pounding like a blacksmith.

I was chatting with recently, and we were talking about “walking meter”. The (sometimes) iambic tetrameter is made up of three or four sets of unstressed syllables, made to mimic the pattern of walking. The Charge of the Light Brigade is one example, “Half a league, half a league.” Notice how the line contains a phrase of three syllables, and then another phrase of three syllables.

One specific (understudied) meter that I have been taken with lately is the prolific 9/5 meter I see so common from the poetry of the West circa 1830-1920 or so. It wasn’t invented then, but it was popularized then. It’s usually an iambic tetrameter followed by an iambic trimeter. A popular usage of this is Emily Dickinson’s “I could not stop for death.”

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

I also see a wholesale movement away from strict meter with strict A/B schemas, because it’s seen as juvenile as “nursery rhythm.” This is true of bad strict A/B schemas, but in the right hands, it creates dread, tension, and anticipation. Don’t use simple words, and it won’t sound childish. Here is what I mean. In Rudyard Kipling’s “The Trade”, he talks about submarine warfare. It’s a strict 8/8/8/8, A/B

They bear, in place of classic names,
    Letters and numbers on their skin.
They play their grisly blindfold games
    In little boxes made of tin.

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Section III: But What about Free Verse?

“But Jay Noah,” you say, “I write mostly in free verse, so how does this affect me?”

Great question.

Enter the world of Slant Rhyme Scansion. Since the space to play is less constrained here, there is more freedom. With more freedom, it actually becomes harder to pull off a specific vibe. Here are some of the tools of the trade for the Free Verse Scansion Bible, without giving them all away, after all, you should explore some of this work yourself!

1. Enjambment. Rush those lines along fast, by being creative with your line breaks.

2. Ryhme line endings with the beginnings of the next.

3. Repetition. Repeat line beginnings for a confusing, mulling, crazy feel, too-much-thinking-going-on.

4. Write it Slant. Use Consonance, Assonance, and matching diphthongs to create a rhyme schema that is hard to track with the eyes, but hard to miss with the ear. Here is the first Stanza from Ferlinghetti’s Baseball Canto

   Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

   Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn,
   reading Ezra Pound,
   and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the
   Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first Canto

   See how many long “o” sounds? Popcorn, Pound, Hole, Through, Anglo-Saxon, Canto.

5. Unmatching non-diphthongs. Why does “cellar door” roll so well off the tongue? double letters complement each other, alongside being single-syllable words.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The best way to find these hints is to read modern free verse poets and to read reviews and breakdowns of their poetic theory by a trustworthy critic.

I love this topic so much. If this was helpful, or you want to see more, let me know! I once wrote an 80-page paper on the application of scansion to free verse narrative minor poetry in modernity, and I loved every second of it.

Stay Frosty,

JNG

Image:

I am in the middle of a dozen or so submissions, so my edited and “good” work is being directed there. Paige Ryan ran a note encouraging poets to write an Ekphrasis prompt (check it out here!), with several possible directions for the photos. A sprinkler had broken, and the water froze. I had a LOT of fun with what came into my brain, so here it is.

Mistakes as Cathedrals

Thousands of feet and
thousands of miles of fields
growing maybe wheat or corn
they say the state of Kansas can feed the whole
world. Who watches all that land, who lays eyes
on each silent square foot. 

A sprinkler broke  at night across  a swath and
beautifully ruined an entire patch, I can't escape
how alien the sight, despite understanding
what happened.
I wonder if the sprinkler is embarressed by this, 
if it understands.

Crusted in glass, each thin blade
of grass wearing a sparkeling chandelier for 
which it never asked.

I think of all the acres no one stops for and
It feels like now I own obligation for
having seen this. I wonder what it is, or
if it was meant for me or
whether even looking is a kind of theft. 

Standing bereft, hands on my hips, 
and I stand there with the engine idling
thinking how the world has forgotten to make cathedrals
out of mistakes.