In the Beginning: A Note from the Poetry Editor

DAVID MIDDLETON is the new, and first, poetry
editor of Modern Age. A native of Louisiana, Dr.
Middleton has published several widely praised collections
of poetry including The Burning Fields and
Beyond the Chandeleurs. He is a professor of English,
Alcee Fortier Distinguished Professor, and Poet-in-
Residence at Nicholls State University in
Thibodaux, Louisiana.

In the spring of 1990, John Martin Finlay,
the distinguished Alabama poet, terminally
ill at forty-nine, lay blind and paralyzed
in a railed hospital bed in his room on the
family farm near Enterprise, Alabama. There,
in extremis, he composed in his head, then
dictated to his sister, his final poem, his death
poem, “A Prayer to the Father,” twelve lines
in six couplets addressed to God:

Death is not far from me. At times I crave
The peace I think that it will bring. Be
brave,
I tell myself, for soon your pain will cease.
But terror still obtains when our long lease
On life ends at last. Body and soul,
Which fused together should make up one
whole,
Suffer deprived as they are wrenched
apart.
O God of love and power, hold still my
heart
When death, that ancient awful fact appears;
Preserve my mind from all deranging
fears,
And let me offer up my reason free
And where I thought, there see Thee
perfectly.

Some years before, Finlay wrote another
short poem, “A Room for a Still Life,” a
poem not in the perennially available plain
style of “A Prayer to the Father” but in a
distinctly modern style called post-symbolism,
a style which presents precise images
that have definite symbolic overtones:

A Room for a Still Life

Delicate stalks meander through blue silk
Rootlessly and float blooms white as milk
Upon the sofa’s green. The polished floor
Reflects the island of the room the more
Pelagic light pours through a wall of glass.
Some books of images are stacked en masse
Beside an open clock. Light thickens
now;
The colors change; a copper gold somehow
Like acid etches things, an unseen knife,
The cliffs of vividness, mortal still life.
The modish woman lifts her head to face
The god across the room. A circle base
Supports his damaged body, rods connect
His shattered thighs; each part is flecked
With minute stain. But yet the pieces
hold,
Become themselves pure art, imagined
mold,
In her acute though cool aesthetic mind.
It is the fragment, something not defined
But felt through nerves outside the whole,
Which satisfies and gives her mind its sole
And isolated act these days. Time seems
The kind of autumn light one sees in
dreams,
Which floods a fictive object she had
made,
Which floods her too against a wider
shade.

In the opinion of the poetry editor, this is
the most devastating critique we have in
verse of radical feminism.

These two poems exemplify the kind of
poetry that Modern Age invites poets to
submit for consideration—verse that is well
crafted (metrical verse will be strongly preferred),
that is informed by a knowledge of
Western civilization, that contains emotion
the motivation for which is made clear in the
poem, and that is both sharable and worth
sharing (not narcissistically self-directed,
trivial, or needlessly obscure). As to subject
matter, the poems should be about what T. S.
Eliot called “the permanent things”—love,
death, religion, history, nature, war, politics,
social and personal life, etc. If the poems are
political or social in theme, they should be in
harmony with Modern Age‘s conservative
perspective. Well-made poems that are part
of the ongoing conservative critique of modernity,
especially poems rooted in the values
of the Southern Agrarian writers, are most
welcome. Humorous verse that meets the
other criteria noted here is also invited.

Poems should normally be 40 lines or
under. Submissions should be sent by email
attachment in Word to:

David Middleton, Poetry Editor,
Modern Age, c/o crashaw@juno.com.

A biographical note as an email attachment
should also accompany submissions. Readers
of Modern Age will note the occasional reprinted
poem that shows what the poetry
editor thinks is possible and desirable in new
submissions.

Language, especially the language of poetry,
is at the heart of human experience. In
Genesis, words come before things: God said
Light and there was Light. Socrates, awaiting
execution, listened to his inner voice and
made verses out of Aesop’s Fables. And,
according to Matthew, Jesus died with the
poetry of the psalms on his lips. Poets who
send verse to Modern Age should ponder in
their hearts these mysteries.

In closing, I return to John Finlay, who, at
the beginning of his poetic career, listed in a
journal those qualities by which any poet
attempting to write a great poem should be
guided. The poetry editor asks all poets who
would submit verse to Modern Age to keep in
mind these criteria. Number two is intentionally
repeated as number four for emphasis.

“Notes for the Perfect Poem”

1. It must be about the truth. It must
   give truth.
2. It must be literal, very literal.
3. It must be symbolic, very symbolic,
   but symbolic only in terms of its
   literal “base” or narrative, not in
   terms not growing out of this literal
   whatever you may call it.
4. It must be literal, very literal.
5. It must be clean and lean and have
   the supple, yet firm movement, of
   pure muscle.
6. It must be of the physical world, have
   winter mornings, summer nights,
   creeks, smoke, smells, the reflection
   of a star in a bucket of water, etc. in
   it so that the reader will say, “Oh yes,
   this is just the way it really is.”
7. Yet it must also be abstract.
8. It must come from a man who is
   mature and has mastered himself so
   that he is calm in the good knowledge
   he has of our mystery, our
   language and history.
9. It must be rooted in a particular
   place.
10. It must be whole in its beautifully
    compelling demand that the reader
    engage his wholeness, both his intellect
    and his emotion.
11. It must be moral and cause the reader
    to make one of the three following
    statements: “I should and want to
    lead that kind of life.” “I should not
    and do not want to lead that kind of
    life.” “I should and want to have the
    patience to resign myself to these
    unavoidable facts about life.”
12. It must have both the intensity of
    engagement and the detachment of
    judgement.
13. It must be fully realized in language.
14. It must be plain.
    While no one, beginning with John Finlay,
    believes that such a perfect poem can ever be
    written, these Notes stand as benchmarks for
    the kind of poetry Modern Age hopes to
    attract and publish.