I read Jessica Hornik’s poem “Evening, Lake St. Catherine” in the latest National Review (August 14, 2023). I wish I could reprint it (here it is behind a paywall if you subscribe,) but she’s getting a well-deserved payday and that’s a good thing. It’s a wonderful poem about the highlights of a day folding in towards a moment of reflection or relaxation.

The shape of it is interesting. I’ve been reading about poetic form and function with just enough understanding to make hedged observations. Reading too much into things is a toy I brought with me, but couple that with some gleenings from a well written book, and I’m practically an expert, or the nearest you’re likely to find on the subject in my kitchen at this moment.

The poem is thirteen lines of blank verse set in couplets excepting the last standalone line. The opening line is eight syllables and the next is seven. Then seven then eight, then seven then eight or nine depending on how you pronounce “chocolate.” Nine/seven, five/eight, eight/four, and all alone a ten. There doesn’t seem to be regulation but it follows a mostly iambic music with breaks and me not knowing if a dropped stress is a concession to sense or if she’s shifted to a three syllable foot here and there. Or is it free verse and I’m seeing pieces where there’s a whole? I lack a fluency I wish I had.

I have this issue all the time when reading something that breaks a simple repeated meter. if I see un-st/un-st/un-st/un-st in the first line I say “Iambic tetrameter. If the next line gives me un-st/un-st/un-st/un, what is that? Is that three iambs with an unattached or dropped syllable? Two iambs with an un-st-un foot I looked up so I could call an amphibranch? Is this something poets don’t care about or shrug at?

My inability to catalogue shouldn’t put anyone off. Her poem’s a delight.

Pound recommends listening to poetry in a foreign foreign language so the sound of the music can be heard independent of meaning. Frost recommends picking up conversational rhythms by listening to people talk from another room; muffled through a closed door – I don’t remember his exact phrasing.

I wrote out her stresses by line as I thought they hit and started sounding them out. It’s very pleasant. As I did so, I started putting my own words to her rhythm. The poem below is what I came up with; touched on Marianne Moore’s “unit of sense” I suppose.

I dodged the choc-o-lat/chock-lat pronunciation question with sep-er-rat/sep-rat and realized that I could use the word “evening” at the same point in the body of the poem as she did to convey something else while tying my poem to hers in a way that made happy while acknowledging that I’m being goofy. I wasn’t able to capture the tapering shape of her poem she set up as her ideas lead to completion, which disappoints me. It was that reduction that gave me the idea to write on the subject I did.

I’m assuming I can call this an original poem. If copying form is plagiarism every sonnet writer post Petrarch has some explaining to do. It’s not entirely though, is it? Homage? Oh -maj? Inspired by? Sampled?

Evening, Thoughts Before Dinner

I’ve tried it before, younger then,
and knowing much too little,

and seeing the surface pools
after I’d called it silky smooth,

and dreading shimmer from oil
or a separate sign of treason

in the pan where I thickened stock;
a mocking free flour ball

drawn up and chest full.
I don’t play fair evening these days.

Old men don’t invent solutions
for recipes

older than they. Cornstarch in, a pinch.