The poem is a part of my upcoming collection Rumsfeld’s Sandbox and follows the publication of other poems in the collection. Those poems include:

• “Battlefield Confession”
• “Cigar”
• “Life”
• “Love And War”
• “Old Goth”
• “20 Acres”
• “Nocturne: Battlefield Sonnet”
• “The Armor Dims”
• “Carcass”
• “Siege”
• and “I Like War”

You will soon be able to read Rumsfeld’s Sandbox online as a digital book with audio presentations and downloadable .PDF broadsides and chapbooks. The planned publication date is March 19. Savvy readers will know that this is the anniversary date of the Iraq invasion, particularly the air strike on the presidential palace in Iraq.

More information will be published soon regarding Rumsfeld’s Sandbox. Meanwhile, take a peak at “Gunfight In Manhattan“.

It’s not all that common that you’ll find a journal that will print previously published material. But it clearly states in the guidelines that Breadcrumb Sins will accept previously published poems. I sent them one that had been published in my local newspaper and I’ve been wanting to get it a wider distribution. I believe it’s one of my best poems. Phil loved it. Thanks Phil!

“Old Goth” is the title of the poem. You can read it along with two others – “Nocturne: Battlefield Sonnet” and “The Markets” – at Breadcrumb Sins (direct link). Be sure to rate the poems using the stars at the top of the page.

On another note, World Class Poetry is in transition. I’ve got some new changes coming at the beginning of the year. As a result of my focus on moving this blog and World Class Poetry into a new direction, I’ll be posting less frequently until the changes are complete. Thanks for reading!

Zukofsky was a Modernist. So it shouldn’t surprise me that he did this. All the Modernist’s wrote this way to some extent. One of my favorites, T.S. Eliot, was very adept at it.

Nevertheless, Zukofsky springs a Ballade on us, which is a specific type of form. It isn’t merely rhymed and metered in a nominal sense. It follows a very specific format. There are variations. The one Zukofsky chooses is the Ballade Supreme, consisting of three stanzas of 10 lines each where the final line of each stanza repeats itself. Then there is a five or six line envoy at the end that also repeats the repeating line.

The Ballade Supreme is often a tributary form and here Zukofsky uses it to pay a tribute to J.S. Bach. So I’m reading and come across this:

A pretty May note,
Singing Bach as they dug,

Isenacum en musica, hear us
Digging - we are singing of gardens - March
Day of equal night, Bach's chorus primus
To chorus secundus to the groined arch -
To vanish as the cone fruit of the larch:
Voice a voice blown, returning as May, dew
On night grass: and he said I worked hard, hue
Of word on the melody, (each note worth
Thought the clatter of a water-mill drew):
Labor, light lights in air, on earth, in earth.

...

Coda, see to it the burden renew,
Sound out thick gardens dug up in purlieu
The shrapnel haunts; May is red blossom, berth
Of what times' mill; blood reads the wounds, the cue -
Luteclavicembalo - bullets pursue:
Labor light lights in earth, in air, on earth.

And Part 8 ends.

Zukofky’s “A” is the perfect example of what I was talking about here.

“A” is a poem that can be classified as an avant-garde free verse poem and Zukofsky maintains that mode through most of the poem, but this well placed ballade at the end of Part 8 perfectly illustrates the freedom that poets are allowed to take in crafting their poems.

I’m not suggesting we should move backward to the Modernist poetics, and certainly not to Objectivism, but we should be mindful of the influences of poets like Zukofsky and his Modernist counterparts. We can take what they’ve done and improve upon it. There are poets today who are doing this and I applaud them.