Stories We Tell Ourselves
Build the church, torch the nave
‘Grapes’ is a funny word, but it’s sad too. Like a joke no one tells anymore. I think I have shown you a bit of a terza rima before, in “With Listening Heart” a long time ago. I don’t want to go check, but this terza rima is also a bit like a joke no one tells anymore. What do I mean?
Well, ok, terza rima is a three-line stanzaic form developed in Italy in the late 13th or early 14th century. Its rhyme scheme interlocks from stanza to stanza: ABA BCB CDC DED, and so on—each tercet’s middle line rhyming with the first and third of the next. The form is most famously associated with Dante Alighieri, who employed it in The Divine Comedy to structure his journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. In Dante’s hands, terza rima became a kind of cosmic thread; a rhetorical spiral that propels his Comedy’s theosis forward and held it in place at the same time. Rhyme was not merely musical; it was metaphysical, moral, architectural.
The form, a maddeningly difficult one, was later adopted and adapted by Petrarch and Boccaccio, though it found less currency outside Italy until the Romantic period (whatever that is). In English, it appeared intermittently. Too difficult, some thought, to sustain in a language with fewer rhymes. Shelley used it with great success in Ode to the West Wind, and later poets like Frost, Auden, and Walcott toyed with it, sometimes maintaining its integrity, sometimes letting it fray.
As far as formal poetry goes, it is my first love. So here is one.
We Tell Ourselves Stories What’s funny is we really do say I love you as goodbye in Los Angeles. You were dressed in nothing but a tan line and one shoe. I watched your ankle flex. You sort of confessed you’d slept with someone else last week, or not— the past was "traffic," and you weren’t impressed. Your toes were blistered from the heat. I thought they looked like grapes embalmed in reddish paint. You let me touch you, then said, “Please don’t get caught.” The ceiling fan revolved, deliberate and faint. You fixed your gaze on the vent’s dull brass— reflected once, then gone. A kind of saint? I flipped a quarter and it landed on your ass. I love you is how you say goodbye in Cyberspace too
Now just what the hell was that? Heh.
I could bullshit you, MFA style, and say “my poem is about the awkward choreography of intimacy.” You know the type. Deep breath: “the way desire and detachment move through bodies in heat, in language, in the space between gestures. It's a record of postmodern tenderness: sex under fluorescent lights, the slow drift of affection into irony, and the failed mechanics of love in an age of mediated speech. At its core, it mourns the loss of sincerity without ever saying so, choosing instead to gesture at meaning through form, misdirection, and the shrug of a final line.”
That was pretty good, huh? Remember, I have an undergraduate duhgree in poetic bullshit. It’s almost cheating to have my own work to bullshit on. But, as with all thinks artiste, the truth is more banal. It came from a group chat: “‘I love you’ is how you say goodbye in Cyberspace,” said my interlocutor.
Well that shit landed on me, and I said “that’s a brilliant line”.
Cairo Smith, over at
asked “what’s it from.”I said “Sounds like some Sunset Boulevard country music B-side from the seventies. Ostrich leather boots with pink trim. You know”
Original Motherfucker, the Ahab of the group, confessed: “My ex used to say “‘I love you’ is how you say goodbye in Los Angeles”; claims she made it up, highly doubt it”
By then I’d already decided it needed to be a poem.
Like Babe Ruth, I called my shot. “There should be a gangrenous foot in this poem but it shouldn't seem like that, and it's definitely a terza rima.”
But, let’s go back and look at this rima thing a little closer.
So I said it was my first love in terms of formal poetry. Unlike ye flippant reactionaries, I am not the biggest fan of “returning to form,” simply for the sake of “returning to form.” I like form, love it even, but I am not entirely sure “form for the sake of form” restores any prestige, meaning or freshness to poesie. Last week I brought you some formal triolets, but I did it because the hallucinatory carousel of the form really jived with what I was after. The time before that, I brought you some Imagism driven by anapestic snake bites— again, because it seemed right.
Terza rima is a hard bite in English. We don’t have all of the -issimos of conjugated verb systems. I’ve talked about that before. The effect is that rhyme stands out in English. If you do it too much for no reason, you sound deliberately archaic, or worse, “sing-songy.” I didn’t learn about the rima from Dante though, I learned it from Eliot. And he was prone to breaking formal rules. Here’s what he had to say:
I call my tercets terza rima simply because this alternation of weak and strong endings is, in my opinion, the closest equivalent to terza rima possible in English. I am familiar with several translations of Dante in terza rima, of course, especially Binyon’s, which is the best I know. But I feel very strongly that rhymes in English are too emphatic, and in a passage of any length this form of verse becomes tiring. In Italian the rhymes seem to come quite naturally and lightly. This cannot be reproduced by English rhymes.
As it turns out, he was wrong. You can just do things.
But if you’ll remember, I pointed out that I don’t really like strict formal adherence just for the sake of it, and my general proclivity for dissonance, inherited from the Modernists, means I really like to break the forms. You can’t break a form that you’re not even calling forth, but it’s worth noting that most English language terzas take the form of a modified sonnet. A typical sonnet structure is going to be three quatrains and a couplet. We are already bending it by writing in tercets, but the standard “terza rima sonnet” has usually been built as four tercets (ABA BCB CDC DED EE).
I broke it, at the very end.
The deviation from the expected terminal couplet, shifting from EE to EF, is not a quirk but a structural rupture. In classical poetics, the couplet offers closure, a final chamber where argument resolves in sound and sense. Terza rima, with its interlocked rhythm, often concedes to this in English as a gesture of rest. Sandbatch refuses that rest. The final off-rhyme ends on Cyberspace, a word cold, metallic, and unmusical. The form breaks at the edge of the digital, where no lyric belongs. It’s a kind of suicide-bomb exploding in the temple of tradition, but at least there is a tradition to bomb.
Then comes too, a word that trails behind without a rhyme to hold. It is not a line but an echo. It marks what should have been closure, now left hovering. The poem ends not with finality, but with the faint trace of a form that could not finish. Rhyme persists only as memory. The joke is not completed. The story does not close.
Anyway, sorry I have been away for a bit. A week without a post is starting to get rare, but if you’ll remember I have been working maniacally on not one, not two, but three manuscripts. I have two of them done now. So I wasn’t just fucking off to Tahiti.
Will share more details soon. And as an aside— we are now the 55th ranked “History” Substack on the whole website, which I assume means people are leaving the website, but I’ll take “line go up” however I can get it. To celebrate, I will write a couple of real “History” posts.
Have a good Junetevening.