Poetry Stream

11 November 2025

Several weeks have passed since the previous post, and again, I have no idea, or a backup, of what went before this post. However, it sounds like it follows the previous post, more on how my study, and my specialty in the “long 19th-century” of British literature, covering from the early Romantics (Blake, etc.) through the Modernists (Eliot, etc.), informed my poetic voice and process, as illustrated below.

10 September 2012

As I stated in my short biography, my poetry is much like Wordsworth’s, underlining my study of British Romanticism, and I suspect that my poetic process is also similar to Wordsworth’s. For the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordworth & Coleridge’s first published collection of ‘romantic poetry’ (although they did not call it so), Wordsworth added a Preface (1805) in which he tried to explain what it was they were trying to do with this new kind of poetry, for it was very different from the previous generation’s poetry (principle example, Alexander Pope, thousands of lines of ‘heroic couplets’–two lines rhymed, which is quite the trick in English, since we have a limited number of possible rhymes, whereas a language like French or Italian, whose word endings are all the same, has an unlimited supply of rhymes–the repetition of rhymes in English, i.e., Pope, becomes, well, annoying after 10,000 lines!). An explanation was demanded, and Wordsworth tried to explain, although he left Coleridge out of the loop, and worse yet, moved Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the first edition’s principle poem, to the end, (without Coleridge’s permission–he was in Germany studying philosophy at the time) and added the famous/infamous Preface.

Wordsworth explains that one of the things they (read here, ‘he’) wanted to do was write about things ordinary, poetry about ordinary people, things, and life, so they took up subjects that had been considered unacceptable for the ‘high art form’ of poetry–the leach gatherer in “Resolution and Independence,” or the woman who sang as she reaped in “The Solitary Reaper,” or the tragic tale of “Michael,” the poor sheepherder and his wife. He also described his process, stating that poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and these feelings are “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Thus for Wordsworth, in a tranquil moment, would recall some incident, later called “spots of time,” recall it so clearly that he, as poet, would be again inside this powerful moment and from this position begin to compose the poem. This describes what I, as poet, do to write a poem–recall an event, put myself inside it, then describe what happened. Perhaps an example of this action would aid my readers.

Several weeks back, after finding and adding an old friend from my Priest River, ID days to my Facebook page, one of his older posts–over a year old–resurfaced, making it seem that his father had just died. I read it and remembered something about his father, a comment his father made that seemed to encapsulate the essence of Vern Leiser. His son remembered his father saying such, and I knew at once that I had to write a poem about the moment, the Wordsworthian ‘spot of time’, when he made this comment, as it had made such a profound impact on me. This morning I decided it was time to act, so I recalled the incident as clearly as I could, then began to compose, putting in as many details as possible, striving for an original look at something that was common, and came up with the following:

Mattress Wrestling

Mark & I forced
king-sized mattress
out of upstairs bedroom
wobbling
bending we
sweated
grunted
trying to keep unruly object
upright
on its side we
dragged
pushed
wrestled
floppy foam down hallway
Mark’s dad Vern
supervised
upstairs Dad looked up stairs
supervising
from below whenever jobs
needed doing
always done by “Dad & Vern”
although we did
all the work
concerned about wall damage
Dad shouted warnings Vern
encouraged
us to greater effort
unwieldy stuffed cotton bladder
pushed pulled us
downstairs we
panted
gasped
for breath glad we had
escaped
destruction by 6×7 foot
willful foam object Vern
looked at us
eyes twinkling with mischief
“Moving a mattress is
like wrestling a fat woman”
he quipped we
collapsed
overcome by laughter
unable to move for quarter hour
overwhelmed
by Vern’s ludicrous statement
Dad shook his head
rolled
his eyes upward
“teenagers” he mumbled
sometime later we
managed
wrestled
foamy fat woman
onto flat bed of our
Studebaker 1 ton still
chuckling
over Vern’s “wrestling a fat woman.”

In memory of Vern L.

Hope all enjoyed this week’s chapter!