We haven't discussed the eclogue in all our time together at Wednesdays@One, though many of poems that you've submitted over the years have touched on or gestured toward the genre. What's an eclogue?
Robert Fagles defines it literally in the introduction to his translation of The Aeneid: "a word that means something like 'Selections'." An eclogue is a "taste of life" that you might be more or less familiar with, but have perhaps not experienced directly.
But more to the point of this project (writing poems with the title "Pavement"), Fagles goes on to describe the eclogue as "a genre of poetry that used the Homeric hexameter for very un-Homeric themes: the singing contests, love affairs, and rivalries of shepherds and herdsmen who relieved the boredom of their lonely rural life by competing in song accompanied by pipes and pursuing their love affairs and rivalries far from the city and the farmlands, in the hills with their sheep, goats, and cattle."
Before I go farther . . . the project. Write a poem with the title "Pavement." Your poem can be literally about pavement; it can be about pavement in relation to earth or soil, that is, wilderness; it can be about pavement in relation to cultivated earth or soil, that is, farmland (and all the things that go with farmland: farms and farming, farmers, crops, animals and husbandry, farm customs, tilling, planting and harvests, weather, etc.). It can be about one way of life as opposed to or in complement to another way of life. Or, as I say, it can simply be about . . . pavement.
I mentioned during our salon today that I need your help writing a jazz poem on this subject. If each of you comes up with a take on "pavement" as a theme or a rhetorical device in a poem, I hope to grab from you some insights, language, rhythms, tones, etc. that I can make my own poem from, something that my band can then work on as a jazz piece.
But I have another use in mind as well. I am working on what you might call a group of "urban eclogues," poems that very loosely follow Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar. But instead of setting them in the countryside, among shepherds and their flocks, as Spenser did, I place them in New York City, where my "shepherds" are city denizens of all sorts and settings are street scenes and cares are cosmopolitan, urban, "concrete." So your poems titled "Pavement" will help with this project, too. But see below for more background on the eclogue and some of its basic elements (which I'm trying to preserve or at least suggest in my urban version).
I've joked before, probably even during one of our salons, that I prefer pavement. Ha. Ha. I mean this as a lifestyle choice and as a philosophy. I prefer the community that pavement implies (town vs. country, for instance). I prefer the stability of pavement, rather like the firm footing (literally and figuratively) that paved surfaces promise. "Pavement" implies to me order, governance; safety and security; achievement, public expression; humanity and community; mutuality and responsibility (as in the give and take of living among others); norms. "Pavement" implies to me structures, such as buildings and bridges, thoroughfares and boulevards, promenades and city parks, cities in other words. "Pavement," as I use the term when I say "I prefer pavement," implies the social life, law, commonality, and from there, tolerance and forbearance, interdependence.
For you it might mean something like this, or something more like scourge, inhumanity, technology run amok, hubris, the unnatural, even the death of nature. That's okay for your poem. I'm after your take on whatever the word "pavement" conjures for you intellectually and emotionally.
I'll close with a few of the elements of an eclogue, which may or may not be helpful as you think about your poem, so feel free to ignore these things.
- The pastoral, or rural life as more natural and more humane than city life
- Shepherds (that is, not aristocrats or intellectuals or the hoity-toity) in their element: tending fields and flocks, lounging in the great outdoors, suffering wants and ills, defending against dangers of all kind--but readily recognizable dangers, like marauding wolves
- Love complaints, love rivalries, love songs and ballads (eclogues often embed songs, ballads and the like)
- Contests, friendly or otherwise, between shepherds or country wanderers, on various subjects, such as country vs. city, competing prowess, lovelorn-ness, rivalries in love, or fortune good and bad
- Dialogue between or among characters that are often realized as types (the wastrel, the frugal shepherd, the wise old man, the impatient young man, the cheat, the puritan, the fool, the faker--note that I haven't mentioned women in this list; women in pastoral writing, eclogues especially, are depicted as objects of desire, the things shepherds lust after and compete for . . . so, what's changed, eh?)
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