Poems...come share your work.

[Kast]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/bo...fire.html?_r=1

"Nabokov’s English poems share some of the qualities of his prose, notably its confident lucidity (Nabokov is complex, but never garbled) and elegantly unfolding inventiveness. While the poems are slightly simpler in diction than the typical Nabokovian sentence, his fondness for half-­dollar words is still much in evidence: over the course of 10 pages, we get “prototypic,” “anchoret,” “scholiastic” and “dendrologists.” And as you might expect, Nabokov fixates on — and is sometimes fixated by — formal prestidigitation. Notice the way he not only juggles the potentially heavy rhymes in the tercets that conclude “Lines Written in Oregon,” but throws in a little French and German as well:

And I rest where I awoke

In the sea shade — l’ombre glauque —

Of a legendary oak;

Where the woods get ever dimmer,

Where the Phantom Orchids

glimmer —

Esmeralda, immer immer.

The poem, which recalls Nabokov’s own visit to Oregon, is about the interaction of Old World and New (thus the French and German, which would otherwise be little more than showing off). But there’s an additional, subtle formal touch. The ­poem’s unusual trochaic meter is also used in Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” one of the definitive early poems of America — and that meter in turn was inspired by the Finnish “Kalevala,” one of the great mythic poems of Europe. It’s an ingenious fusion of structure and theme."