Kilmer died a soldier in WWI. I vaguely remember a film--must have
been 30s or 40s Hollywood--in which he's featured as a rather
lachrymose girlie-man of a soldier--the popular idea of male poets at
the time.
Mark
At 05:53 PM 2/13/2006, you wrote:
>Mark Weiss wrote:
>
>>Here's an aspect of meter that we never covered during any of the
>>past donnybrooks: its usefulness for marching. No army ever
>>advanced to free verse. So, earlier today, as I slogged through the
>>day-old snow in the improbable forest that borders my lodgings, I
>>realized that I was keeping cadence by humming, over and over, "I
>>think that I shall never see-ee-ee/ a pome beauteeful as a
>>tree-ee-ee." Curse you, Joyce Kilmer!
>>
>>Mark
>
>Desultory comments--my office was shut down today.
>
>Marching verse. "The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold and
>his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold." Nice beat but can
>you dance to it?
>
>Or this--
>
> "Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard.
> And he taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred.
> He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
> But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
> Bess, the landlord's daughter,
> Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair."
>
>Actually that's less of a marching tune than the Byron, Noyes was
>really going for it and it's way more sophisticated than I
>remembered, considering I haven't read it since high school. "The
>Highwayman" is as hammy as hell and was turned into an appropriately
>hammy movie in 1951.
>Dan O'Herlihy who I recall had some swash and buckle. Would've been
>a perfect role for Flynn.
>
>My equivalent: coming out of a concert or opera humming a
>tune. Unless you're James Levine, you can't come out of the opera
>whistling passages from Lulu or Satyagraha
></html/compositions/satyagraha.html> either (actually with some
>Glass like "Contrary Motion" you've got a prayer because it keeps
>looping). For that matter try whistling some Bartok, Duke
>Bluebeard's Castle. People will look at you funny.
>
>Joyce Kilmer has more stuff in New Jersey named after him than half
>a dozen former Governors. That tells you the level of politics in
>this state. He was born in New Brunswick and graduated from
>Rutgers. He has a school named after him (at least one) and a rest
>stop on the Jersey Turnpike. There's a memorial forest in North
>Carolina named for him' God knows why it's in N.C. except maybe it
>was in Jersey and was paved over to put up a parking lot.
>In grammar school, where I didn't learn any, we had to sing "Trees."
>Every time we got to the word "breast" we all sniggered. I just
>went back and read the poem. It's every bit as bad as I
>remembered. The Old Formalism, perhaps? *I* deserve stuff named
>after me, only my stuff doesn't rhyme and when I say "breast" it's
>not going to get a laugh out of anyone. I hope.
>
>Ken
>
>--
>-------------------
>Kenneth Wolman www.kenwolman.com rainermaria.typepad.com
>"This is the best of all possible worlds only because it is the only
> one that showed up, said father." -- Russell Edson
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