Forgotten Ground Regained
ISSN 2996-6353
New Series Issue 4, Fall, 2024
INTRODUCTION
In my call for submissions, I told interested poets that I wanted to see poems that explored themes of love, devotion, and desire. I got quite a bit that fit that description, but few of them were unalloyed love poems. Most had negative undertones — grief, regret, fear … Maybe I should have expected that — after all, country songs are like that, too. But I was, nonetheless, surprised to discover so many poems that fit right into the conversation started by such Old English poems as ‘Wolf and Eadwacer’ and ‘The Wife’s Lament’. And in fact, the first poem in the set, Maryann Corbett’s “The Translator, Working Late” directly addresses the wife of “The Wife’s Lament”, saying “I get you, girl.” While the occasion for the Old English poem is an (erstwhile) romance, Corbett’s poem itself focuses on an experience of grief and loss, shared across the centuries.
The more-or-less-but-not-quite love poems include Michael Helsem’s “Iftar”, which reads like an elegy for the moment in which people do not quite connect, Alex Rettie’s “The Future”, in which the lovers seem intent on preserving a memento mori instead of a selfie, Ian Holt’s “Mild Soul of Mine”, which captures a lover’s grief in an alliterative translation of a Camoes sonnet, Kathryn Ann Hill’s “Elizabeth and Darcy”, with a rhetorical question for Jae Austen’s “Gentle Reader”, Cassidy McFadzean’s Old English style riddle, “Love her and she swells”, and Jeff Sypeck’s “Entreating a Sick Kitten”, in which compassion does not exactly get its just reward.
Similar themes carry through in the two longer narrative selections in this issue. The excerpt from my Tolkien fan poem, “The Redemption of Daeron”, explores how grief and unrequited love can block the ability to live and love beyond the moment of loss. Simon Corble’s except from his dramatic version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, on the other hand, explores love as a trap, in which Sir Gawain’s attempt to live by the ideals of courtly honor becomes a foxhunt in which he is the fox, and a lady’s green girdle becomes the snare his very courtesy makes it impossible for him to evade.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight also provides the occasion for the first article in the collection:- Martin Kennedy Yates’ love song to that Middle English poem, in the form of an article on that poem’s alliterative meter and four alliterative poems set in an invented Midlands dialect that illustrate the rhythm and the sensations produced by reading a poem in a half-familiar tongue.
The second article in the issue is one of mine, in which I present medievalist scholar Geoffrey Russom’s theory of alliterative meter and develop its implications for modern English alliterative verse. Russom argues that poetry has a natural connection to the normal rhythms and structures of the language, and when inherited forms fail to match the living language, they risk obsolescence. That is his explanation for the death of alliterative meter in the 15th century, but it also suggests a path forward for modern English alliterative verse.
The above sequence of poems and articles caps off the thematic content of the issue. But they do not complete the content I have to offer. After I provide links to a variety of alliterative poems published in journals, books and blogs, and present my new Call for Submissions, I include two more poems, designed to remind the reader of poetry’s connection to our larger world.
In the first such offering, I reprint J.D. Harlock’s alliterative free verse poem “To Consecrate our Calamities, to Commemorate This Carnage”. Coming from a Lebanese/Syrian/Palestinian writer in this current age of conflict, the poem serves to place a dark underline beneath the more personal pains of romantic love. Love – whether joyful or grieving – must somehow survive in a world beset by dictators, genocidal assaults,, and wars of conquest and domination.
And finally, in honor of the season, I present a revised and expanded excerpt from the Autumn sequence in Rahul Gupta’s ongoing Arthuriad. This excerpt explores images of death and decay amid the falling leaves of Autumn. It illustrates the continuing power of pure Old English meter, and creates an incantatory, dream-like effect in which one image is piled on top of another, as autumn trends inexorably toward winter.
This issue marks the first full year in which I have been publishing regular quarterly issues. Over the course of the year, we have met some of the most creative poets writing in modern English alliterative verse and discovered hidden gems – poetry that has been buried in the back of old magazines, or even (in the case of Pat Masson’s “A Lay of St. Boniface) in a private memorial booklet, for the last twenty to fifty years. Now they are yours to enjoy.