Surplus Poetry

Books and Media
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I have an article in this month’s Pennsylvania Lawyer Magazine, , “Land-use Lyricisn: ‘Beauty for Ashes’-A Zoning Hearing in Verse”. It’s one I’ve been wanting to write ever since I encountered Christopher LaFarge’s 1953 verse novel, and my kind editor indulged me.
But here’s the thing: there was so much more poetry I woulda liked to include! Although I suspect the piece probably has too much poetry for lawyers, and too much law for poetry lovers.

“Beauty for Ashes” and its prequel, “Hoxsie Sells His Acres” have to do with the development of rural agricultural America. In the first book an aging farmer, Walter Hoxsie, is contemplating selling his large farm to a developer. He’s land-poor. The land is all he’s got, it really isn’t much good for farming, he has no issue interested in it. The fictional Rhode Island village where the novel is set is divided over this issue. The wealthier people, both longtime residents and recent purchasers, are totally opposed because they don’t want their panoramic views spoiled by little houses made of tricky-tacky. They try to get the community to agree to chip in to offer Hoxsie a better price that the developer, but not everybody is on board; they don’t see why they should spend their own money on this, it won’t be the last such situation, and some think the development has to mean they themselves will make more money, either in their own trades or be selling their own inherited parcels. So, no suspense: we know from the title what’s going to happen. Now for the poetry I couldn’t work in to my rticle.

Here’s Charles Henredene, one of the “old money” residents of the village, upon finding out that the sale is a done deal, musing in elegiac iambic pentameter:

“…Should I not be sad/That those who follow must be witnesses/Of ugliness increasing on their years/Where mine were framed in beauty? I can feel/No sorrow but my own, no joy but mine,/…I shall be wise and turn my eyes to winter,/Spurning the Spring that is no longer mine/And with its coming, I shall cling to this/Still winter and past springs, a static love,/More lovely being still”

And young Asa Congdon, from one of the original farming families, also land-poor, heir to a big parcel,of land he has no interest in farming , who agitated for Hoxsie to sell, now looking out over the new construction and farming his thoughts in the more demotic iambic tetrameter:

“Well I hope to God that it does some good/And brings the trade like I said it would./And I hope we mange to sell our land/ When this job’s settled nd well in hand,/But I dunno, now April’s here/It ain’t the same as it was last year./I wish I hadn’t come out to see/How the work was going. it seems to me/I get small pleasure and it don’t last/ From seeing them cut the trees so fast;/They fall steady, long row on row,/So many trees for a bungalow;/Pity they seem to be so afraid/Their little houses might get some shade.”

Yesterday I read a piece about Sir Roger Scruton, philosopher and aesthetician. ( no that isn’t the word! Aesthetitist?) — any way, he’s reputed to have held tht beauty is not subjective but is an “objective truth that reconciles us to existence”. , as the author of that piece put it. As a denizen of rural Pennsylvania which is currently under siege by data centers, i totally get that. The two excerpts of LaFarge’s poetry show one man (Charles) explicitly recognizing tht truth, resigning himself to the passing of beauty, and the other (Asa) surprised to discover that he’s not immune after all to melancholy at its destruction.

Thanks for letting me share these passages. I just..,..felt compelled to do it!

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Wow! Every day is a school day, as my sister-in-law says. I knew that the Conquistadors would sometimes report back to the King of Spain in verse – sometimes very long verse. And I was aware that the ability to write missives in verse was a key attribute for an up & coming Mandarin in the old Chinese courts. But a verse novel – in English!

If copyright allows, please post a link to your recent article. It sounds fascinating. What could possibly rhyme with “not withstanding the foregoing” or “the Party of the First Part”? :grinning:

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The zoning hearing part of Beauty for Ashes is in free verse. It’s set up like a play, or like a transcript.

I’d be happy to send my article.to anyone interested! ( I don’t think I can link to it since the publication is for Pa bar members only.)

BUt yeah there are several novels in verse in English. My fave is Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate. Parts of Vance Bourjailly’s Last Exit to Canterbury are in verse. But I really think LaFarge’s Hoxsie Sells his Acres is the best one I’ve ever read.

I’m not that nuts about free verse. It can read like the “poet” just put in line breaks at random. The best free verse I’ve ever read is Spoon River Anthology (which actually is kinda a novel in verse, too…) There’s just never any doubt you’re reading poetry with that.

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As it happens, I have been reading Prof. John McWhorter’s 2003 book “Doing Our Own Thing: the degradation of language and music, and why we should, like, care”. He dedicates a whole chapter to the topic “Why I don’t have any poetry”.

Prof. McWhorter is often as entertaining as he is informative, but in this volume he gives the impression of being conflicted. On the one hand, as a linguist he understands and celebrates the continual evolution of language. On the other hand, as an individual he mourns the passing of the language which could create the Gettysburg Address.

About 125,000 years ago, so they say, the ancestors of today’s humans gained the ability to communicate in speech. The subsequent continuous evolution of spoken language has given us at least 6,000 languages in the world today. Much more recently, perhaps 5,000 years ago, humans began to develop writing – ways of recording spoken language. With the spread of literacy in the last few centuries, written language began to affect spoken language – more structure, more logic, more style. And then came the 1960s.

Prof. McWhorter sees the 1960s as the break point. He posits: “… the proper use of English has gone the way of the dodo …”. But then, the proper use of English was a relatively recent development in the historical evolution of the English language, and apparently just another transient phase. In the 1960s, “getting real” took priority in communication over well-structured language. We began to write like we talk – a process that subsequently accelerated with e-mail and text messaging. And removed from the discipline of structured written language, our speech became even looser. McWhorter doesn’t complain about this, because language has always been in flux.

Poetry had long been important to the human race as a medium of communication, and a way of recording the story before writing had been invented. Homer’s Iliad is a classic example. McWhorter even notes that a scientist investigating the origins of syphilis in 1530 reported his discoveries in verse. As education became more widespread from the 1800s onwards, poetry was taught in schools, affirming its position as part of the shared heritage of a population. But after the 1960s, classic poetry was dropped as old-fashioned, while modern poetry became the narrow interest of a small number of academics separated from the broad public.

Thus here we are today – the moving finger no longer writes, and spoken language moves on. With the link to written language having been broken, spoken language continues to evolve – even if some of us may feel that something valuable is being lost in that evolution.

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