Forgotten Ground Regained

Why Alliterative?

There’s nothing wrong with the ring of a linein free verse. Or the froward tonesromantics mete by measure and rod—anapaestic pestle and mortar—that lead lovers to the lonesome old rhyme.There’s nothing wasted in water colors,nothing lost in the nicking whittleof wood by syllabic means and ways.It’s just what’s hard is healthy and better —graven imagined holiday grouse—the time of the shaving of travertine, the sanding of white limestone(or cream-colored or rust creases),the danger of veins that vertically sheera nose from a face— these need be the risks.Alliterative meter is like this.It is taking forth the travertine of English as it’s spoken. It earmarks its cadence.For a spic and span space is natural.A black and blue bursa pains.To be in for a dime is to be in for a dollar.We talk in this way without terrible fretting,but ignore our English when inspirationtakes our pens. But this is poetry’s desperate call: to spend hourstrying to catch a turkey plume —a feather fall — with furtive clinging, with a Webber grill lid waving,with nets and desk lids and a gnarly mob,only to panic and collapse on the paver stonesand in a desperate gasp to sob our griefsuck in the feather in our sound hole.