Akhmatova Odes:
150 Sprung Sonnets and 50 Haiku Strings
for Four Voices
BY DON MAGER

[AA]   Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) was a Russian poet who lived during the Soviet era and was victim to Stalinist persecution including censorship, and punishment of her husband and son. She is also a character in Marc Satterwhite’s opera, Akhmatova, whose libretto is by [DM]. Her great poem, Поэма без героя (Poem Without a Hero), first struck in 1942, but her work on its variants and additions carried forward lurchingly almost to her death.

[DM]   Don Mager (b.1942) is an American Cold War and post-Cold War era poet and translator, who wrote the libretto to the opera Akhmatova, and translated all five variants of Poem Without a Hero by [AA]—a book length manuscript he is still in the process of annotating and supplementing. Between 1991-1992, Mager translated everything associated with the title Anfنnge und Fragmente aus dem Umkreis der Elegien (Beginnings and Fragments From the Thematic Material of The Duino Elegies) by [RMR]. Although some pieces have been published in journals, the entire book length manuscript has not. However lurchingly, has [DM]’s great poem yet struck?

[His Editor]   [DM] imagines he has an editor, who late in the cycle starts to voice opinions and despite that he’s ephemeral seems to own the last word.

[RMR]   Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was a German poet whose major work appeared during the first two decades of the 20th century. His great poem, Duino Elegies, first struck in 1912 but with two finished elegies, waited over a decade, during which WWI intervened, before the poet was able lurchingly to complete the other eight.

Contents

Number One           Ode to Mothers
Number Two           Ode to Being in Language
Number Three           Ode to Osip Mandelstam
Number Four           The Gigolo Ode
Number Five           Ode to Jokes
Number Six           Ode to Crypts
Number Seven           Ode to Nadezda Mandelstam
Number Eight           Ode to Stalin’s Daughter
Number Nine           Ode Against Irony
Number Ten           Ode On The Iraq War
Number Eleven           Ode to Boris Pasternak
Number Twelve           Ode to Trees
Number Thirteen           Ode to Youth
Number Fourteen           Ode to Angels
Number Fifteen           Ode to Prophets
Number Sixteen           Ode to Fame
Number Seventeen       Ode to Choice
Number Eighteen           Ode to Power
Number Nineteen           The Gray Ode
Number Twenty           Ode to Despair
Number Twenty-One       Ode to Alexander Blok
Number Twenty-Two       Ode to Spring
Number Twenty-Three       Ode to Translations
Number Twenty-Four       Ode to Rhymes
Number Twenty-Five       Ode to the Movie
Number Twenty-Six:            The Leukemia Ode
Number Twenty-Seven:        Ode to Beginnings
Number Twenty-Eight       The Presidential Campaign Ode
Number Twenty-Nine       Ode to Hiatuses
Number Thirty           The Reply Ode
Number Thirty-One       Ode to the Myriad Dead
Number Thirty-Two       Symphony Ode
Number Thirty-Three        The “But” Ode
Number Thirty-Four        The Cold Ode
Number Thirty-Five       Ode to Heroes
Number Thirty-Six       The Homeless Ode
Number Thirty-Seven        The Crowning Ode
Number Thirty-Eight        Prague in March
Number Thirty-Nine         Khersones In April
Number Forty:             Worpswede In April
Number Forty-One         Tsarskoe Selo in May
Number Forty-Two         Paris in May
Number Forty-Three         Paris in June
Number Forty-Four        Duino in July
Number Forty-Five         Petrograd in July
Number Forty-Six         Munich in August
Number Forty-Seven        Tashkent in August
Number Forty-Eight        Muzot in August
Number Forty-Nine        Komarova in August
Number Fifty          Charlotte in September

Afterword           Why Form?

Form is the scaffolding of artistic works, either rules inherited or rules imposed—strict or loose. In the face of rules, one always can choose: conformity, defiance, submission, innovation. Wordsmith, playwright—both old terms affirm a craftsman skilled at construction. I like that.   As important for me, form is the musical score that guides an oral performance of a poem, but can never dictate it.   Poems that give little guidance for oral reading, or that when read aloud seem flaccid, lose interest for me quickly. From Beowulf to Omeros, with hundreds of stops in between, poetry that excites my voice and ear calls me back again and again to read it.

At the suggestion of Helen Frost, I write these comments on the formal aspects of The Akhmatova Odes. She has written similar pieces as afterwords to two of her recent books.    In ancient Greek poetry the ode was used for choruses in tragedy and for celebratory public tributes as in Pindar’s odes to Olympic athletes. Often (not always) odes were choreographed in a four part danced-sung sequence: turn, counterturn, repeat of the turn, resolution. These parts had names.

In the late 19th century, by replacing measured feet (such as iambs in sonnets) with alliteration-reinforced accentual counts, the Anglo-Welsh poet Gerard Manly Hopkins “sprung open” the traditional iambic line in what he called “sprung rhythm.” No matter how rigorously one attempts to work out scansions of Hopkins’s most radically sprung poems on paper, to my ear, his rhythm only makes sense when practiced and read aloud. For a long time I have relished performing Hopkins's poems, finding the “sprungness” dazzling— kinesthetically entering my body so that I cannot stay seated while reading—an experience I have with many poets whose work I repeatedly turn to. Key to this pleasure are the necessary roles of practice, voice and body.

A couple decades ago I experimented with the sonnet and developed a form with 14 lines of 9 syllables each, following the rhyme scheme of ABCDEFGGFEDCBA. This form cut against two tendencies of some modern sonnets to feel and sound antiquated: the iambic meter and the close repetitions of rhymes which so easily fall on end-stops. I also exploited enjambment and slant rhymes. Thus I had a structure that, as Rita Dove said about her sonnets, reflects the recognizable “container” of the sonnet without its potential for numbing rigidity. The problem with the traditional form is that the form starts to dictate the language leading to ingenuous phrasings and forced word choices. She also speaks of a “sonnet feel” to some of her poems that may not be exactly 14 lines.

For The Akhmatova Odes I went back to my 14 lines “container” with its “cupped hands within cupped hands within cupped hands” rhyme scheme, and “sprang” it open—this time with 10 syllables per line, or 140 syllables to each. Each ode consists of three “sprung sonnets” (strophe, antistrophe, strophe). When I had the three laid out and counted, I analyzed where words fell within the counts in order to arrange lines in mirror patterns based on syllables—1st and last line mirror, 2nd and second to last, 3rd and third to last, and so on. Total number of lines varies depending on how many long or short lines it has—lines being determined by numbers of syllables. In any give ode, the sections in [DM]’s voice are identical mirrored patterns. If one lays one of these on top of another, the indentions on the left margin match, as do the total lines. In the first thirty odes or so, most of the sections in [AA]’s voice follow a syllabic pattern of their own, unrelated to those in [DM]’ or [RMR]’s voices, which is not a mirror, but rather alternating sequences of 9, 7 and 5 syllable lines. When exceptions occur, they are deliberate and worth attention.   Visually, the left margin simply guides the syllabic counts: no tabs in for 10 syllable lines, 1 tab in for 9 syllable lines, 2 tabs in for 8 syllable lines, and so forth. Although this typography does not have anything to do with guiding ones oral performance, it does create a gracious visual view of the poems. If lines were all set to the left margin would make the poems look like the most unplanned of free verse—a tradition these poems have no truck with.

The “springing open” of the 14 line structure invites one to figure out ways to perform aloud these poems. Sentence ends, commas, dashes, ellipses and line breaks all invite the reader aloud to choose how emphatic a pause the words can bear, and when the mental lift of an enjambment may be better.

Particular words in each ode, based on their numerical position counting from top and bottom of each sonnet, are in UPPER CASE.   In an oral reading these also invite and challenge the reader to decide how to perform them.

One sonnet each from odes 23 through 37 form what is called a crown of sonnets; that is where the last line of one forms the first line of the next.   As the sequent comes full circle with the 14th, the 15th repeats each of the 14 crowning line in order. Finally the epodes are loose strings of haiku—often with dense internal resonances of consonance and assonance. In general I despise the current habit of centering poetic texts on printed or website pages. Whatever accidental visual grace may be obtained is ultimately meaningless. I center the epodes, because haiku do seem to benefit from this typography,

and visually the epodes set themselves off as prosodically as well as aurally distinct from the three earlier sections of each ode.