Adventures in Form & the Ode On Love

I learned very quickly, as soon as we started going out in 2001: Mary Harju is a complicated person. Different strains in her personality mix and match, or don't mix and match, with others. As has been said: Mary liked to dress provocatively. What she liked to read was a quirky tangent to that: she doted over Victorian novels, and doted on my attachment to the English Romantic poets as well, especially (and predictably) Lord Byron. Mary tended to think of free-verse poetry as lightweight, not very serious. The entire twentieth century landscape around English language poetry was largely a dead-end street for her, and she often said as much. As was fortuitous, as of '01/'02 I began to experiment with the most serious versions of poetic formality. The form I was most attracted to was that employed by John Keats in his odal cycle. For many months in early '02, six months before the Ode On Jazz, I attempted to employ the Keats odal form successfully. I often read, during those months, at a salon being held by Natalie Felix at the North Cafe on South Street in South Philly. Some of the formal experiments were half-assed, some weren't. The most successful experiment from that period by far was the Ode On Love, which was published by Marilyn Bess's Hinge Online, in 2003. The Ode On Love was written for Mary, because I wanted to write something for her that she could care about, that she would find moving. The crowd at the North Cafe were respectful but also wary; as was a crowd I read to at Borders on Walnut Street to back, for Alexandra Grilikhes, an issue of American Writing which came out in '02. The way the Ode On Love played at readings, the general sense was irresolution: not knowing what to think. I was irresolute, too; one reason that, by mixing in jazz in late '02, I found myself on more comfortable ground. Formal rigor is threatening, because so few people can achieve it the right way. It's extremely, uncompromisingly exclusive. Philly does not find this prohibitive.