Forgotten Ground Regained
ISSN 2996-6353
INTRODUCTION
Some of the most famous medieval alliterative poems are narratives. This not only includes such famous go-tos as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but a huge array of Old English poems based on Biblical stories, such as Andreas, a similarly large array of Middle English Arthurian romances, and even The Scottish Field (~ 1515), the last alliterative poem of the native tradition, celebrating the English victory at Flodden Field.
But alliterative poetry was also deployed as lyric. One of the most striking Old English examples is “Wolf and Eadwacer”, the song of a woman lamenting for her exiled lover (see this article by O.D. Macrae-Gibson), or “Blow Northern Wind”, a Middle English love song. One of the things I am hoping this issue will highlight is the lyrical potential of modern alliterative poetry. The topic “Moments Sensed and Seen” highlights the personal. meditative focus so common in late 20th and early 21st century poetry, and so provides a way for readers to get a sense of alliterative poetry’s lyric potential.
I believe that the poems I am publishing in this issue do exactly what I hoped they would: Highlight the ways in which alliterative poetry can be used to enchant readers, creating what Walt Whitman called a “song of myself”. Some of the poems have precisely that strong personal perspective: Aaron Poochigian’s “The Odds and Ends”, Dorothy Nielsen’s “Stiletto”, Jesse Keith Butler’s “Midday Moon”, Lancelot Schaubert’s “Thunderbird”, “Lines on Light”, and “Few Unshorn”, Linda Newns’ “Our Love is a Carnival Ride”, Theric Jepsen’s “Countdown”, Alex Rettie’s “The Creature”, Carla Galdo’s “To a Cat”, Nat Beeton’s “Restless Shores”, Matthew Brennan’s “November Vison”, Jonathan Lovelace’s “Spring Morning”, and Eric Colburn’s “This Moment”. A partially overlapping set of poems focused on literal moments sensed and scene, often in natural settings – a topic which is one of the known strengths of alliterative verse. Such poems include those by Aaron Poochigian and Lancelot Schaubert, Alex Rettie, Nat Beeton, Matthew Brennan, and Jonathan Lovelace; Jonathan Roper’s “Soft City”, Helen Evan’s “Birdfight at West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village” (Yet another poem with crows! O Beloved Bird of Alliterative Verse!), Matthew Dickerson’s “Autumn Feast, Beldon Falls”, and Katherin Ann Hill’s “Snow Begone”. Other poems intersect lyric with a meditative mode: Aaron Poochigian’s “The Odds and Ends”, Linda Newn’s “Area C”, Nat Beeton’s “Restless Shores”, R.A.R. Knight’s “X: Fyr”, Anthony Etherin’s “Lady of the Lake”, and Margaret Noodin’s “Ishkwaa-ishkodeke: The Afterfire”. Tim Miller stands somewhat in a category of his own, with a series of snapshots of historical moments: from prehistory (“Doggerland”) to the Middle Ages (“Bayeux Tapestry, 1070”) and beyond (“Connamara, 1846”, and “The Historian”).
Formally, the poems are, as usual, a mixture ranging from imitations of traditional Germanic alliterative verse to alliterative free verse and alliterative poems in accentual-syllabic forms. The poems that stick closest to the traditional Germanic form include Aaro Poochigian’s “The Odds and Ends”, Dorothy Nielsen’s “Stiletto”, Carla Galdo’s “To a Cat”, Helen Evan’s “Birdfight at West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village”, Nat Beeton’s “Restless Shores”, and Matthew Brennan’s “November Vision”. Other poems adopt a shorter, three-beat line, which is what we see in three of Tim Miller’s four poems, in Theric Jepsen’s “Countdown”, and Kathryn Ann Hills’s “Snow Begone”. We also see three-beat half-lines predominating in R.A.R. Knight’s “X: Fyr”, which almost reads like an alliterative hexameter. Alliterating free verse lines (often quite short) feature in Jesse Keith Butler’s “Midday Moon”, Linda Newn’s “Area C” and “Our Love is a Carnival Ride”, and in Alex Rettie’s “The Creatures”. Alliterative poems with a more accentual-syllabic rhythm include Eric Colburn’s alliterative sonnet “This moment”, Anthony Etherin’s alliterative triolet “Lady of the Lake”, Jonathan Lovelace’s “Spring Morning” and Katherine Ann Hill’s “Snow Begone”, both in rhyming stanzas. The other poems mostly follow looser alliterative forms, usually but not always four-beat, and without a strict division into half-lines.
The final contribution to the Spring issue is Dennis W. Wise’s article, “The Poets of Rum Ram Ruf: Pat Masson”, which first appeared in installments in Withowinde, the journal of Ða Engliscan Gesithas (The English Companions), a British society devoted to all things Old English. This issue has three other reprints: Michael Helsem’s article, “Pieces of Cosette”, Anthony Etherin’s “Lady of the Lake” (from The Robots of Babylon), and Aaron Poochigian’s “The Odds and Ends”, which first appeared in The Hudson Review.
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