song be gentle

i love fireworks. daring experiments, bold revolutions, outrageous ruptures - these are the lifeblood of poetry. quietude, on the other hand, leads to stasis, and stasis leads ultimately to rot. a lot of bad poetry gets written in environments of complacency. yet it’s still not the case that all important, nor, definitely, all beautiful poetry smacks you in the face with the thunderclap of its brilliance.

i want to turn my senses to poetic voices that are often drowned out by such thunder. they speak quietly, carefully; exploring their spaces with a soft, tentative footstep. simple words, sung gently. poems that with their light structures and cadences emanate an aura of hopeful calm. if we don't crane our hungry ears toward their hushed tones, we won't be able to hear what these soft little nursery rhymes can really tell us.

often, it’s the case that such little rhymes appear to be so innocuous that they don’t raise enough of a reaction to really register as worthy poetry. the time and effort spent straining one’s ears to pick up their tiny voices could be better spent directed toward more worthy matters.

i want to argue that this lightness of touch is of radical and profound importance. these poems, with their music of silence, their deceptively easy structures, may reach into rich, hidden immensities that other, bolder poems soar straight over. these songs may be gentle, but I’d like to intimate that they are also deep.

"let your song be gentle," this is the simple request of john shaw neilson on behalf of these little poems. and it is towards him that i first stretch my ear.