Jackson MacLow

Mac Low in 1943 (used by permission of Anne Tardos)

Gamekeepers Dance to the Strokes of Syllables

An irregular curtal sonnet for Paul Blackburn

Put gamekeepers in your hills.
Breakfast on old grass.
Peace, quickly possible, continues speech-rhythms’ irrelevance.
Paragraphs machine you, poplar.
Be cleanly that.
Which of the gamekeepers is having December procedures?

November delivered pulled-paper mountains.
Well, but blue places dance and stroke in syllabic procedures.
November’s deliverance pulled down the paper mountains.
Well, but blue places dance to the strokes of syllables.
                Gamekeepers’ syllables. 

Derived diastically from The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn, ed. Edith Jarolim (New York, Persea, 1985), 387--401, with ‘Paul Blackburn’ as seed text. A ‘curtal [shortened] sonnet’ (G.M. Hopkins) consists of a sestet followed by a quatrain and a half-line tailpiece. This one’s irregular in that it neither rhymes nor has the same number of feet or beats in every line. 

Jackson Mac Low

New York: 26–29 June 2000