By David Krogh
What do you get when you take a civil litigation lawyer who pursues a Masters degree in Liberal Arts (literature)? You get a poet. SE Portland resident David Melville started writing poems while a practicing attorney in Portland. Melville explained how this worked for him, saying, “While law and poetry do seem polar opposites in many ways, the hidden link is a love for words. Lawyers spend their days wrangling over words and their meanings. A love of language and the subtle shades words can have is what drew me to poetry.” Although Melville has been published in several literary journals, Signposts & Hedges is his first book of poems and is well worth the read. It is from Finishing Line Press, a publishing company that specializes in poetry works.
Poetry has changed dramatically since the 1800s. Melville clarified what this means. “Until early in the last century, most poetry rhymed and almost all of it was written in meter. For instance, in England, from Chaucer on through Shakespeare and the Romantic poets like Lord Byron and John Keats, almost all poetry used traditional forms, often employing rhyme. Free verse, that is, poetry without rhyme or meter or traditional line requirements, began in earnest as a real force in the art when Walt Whitman broke the mold with his Leaves of Grass in the mid-1800s.”
In short, free verse allows poets to create their own expression, focusing on imagery and cadence rather than traditional rules. Melville said, “While it typically takes years of hard work for anyone to develop the skill of writing well in free verse, the time and energy required is greater still for traditional forms and rhyme. I am actually relatively uncommon as someone writing today who has a book with a significant number of poems in both free verse and traditional forms. For me, writing with rhyme and form provides an exciting challenge. It’s like a giant puzzle.”
As mentioned above, Signposts & Hedges is uncommon in that it includes a mix of poetry types. What helps to maintain one’s interest and provide a learning experience as well is the author’s explanatory Notes section in the back of the book. That section provides a variety of clarifications and/or definitions for his various poems. For example, although most of the works are done as free verse, there are several poems with definite rhyming and/or formatting. The poem from which the book takes its name is “an iambic pentameter sonnet with a Shakespearean rhyme scheme.” The poem Loppers is a Japanese form of haiku. Two of the poems are ghazals. “In ghazals, couplets end with the same word at the close of each stanza.” The author’s Notes also explain unusual places or people identified within a poem.
Another interesting aspect of Melville’s poetry is his ability to both reference and respond to portions of other classical works. For example, My Inferno, Purgatory and Steps are references to portions of Dante’s Divine Comedy while Yojo is a reference to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. “What I love about the classics,” says Melville, “is that you can read them again and again and they are different each time, and there is always something new to discover. Stories or poems written by people from another time and place also have a great way of jolting me out of my assumptions about the world.”
Melville further explains his love of the classics and their influence on his poetry. “While I was practicing law, I attended Reed College part time. The first class I took was Greek literature, and I fell in love with it. Homer’s Iliad was the first book we read, and I was intrigued how an ancient epic that on the surface was a war poem, at its heart, is actually a poem about loss and grief. While at Reed, I read as many of the classics as I could. For a poet, the classics are a fabulous education, because it makes reading someone like Dante much easier because you already get many of the allusions he makes. I think something similar draws me to them in my own poetry. When I write something in my book which responds to Dante, it’s like I am having a conversation with him in the here and now. It’s a way of saying, his poem has touched me, and I see the world differently in these other ways too.”
Nature and meditation are two aspects of great interest to Melville and both are reflected in many of his poems, especially in his two favorites, Twilight and Silent Music. “I love nature, particularly its dramatic elements, like a cliff over the Oregon coast, or the majesty of Mount Hood, or the thunder before a summer rain shower. Plus, nature has a way of cleansing us from the inside out.”
Melville has also spent considerable time studying Zen and Buddhist spirituality. “Once my shift toward spiritual practices occurred, it almost immediately affected my writing. The spiritual lies beyond easy description, and poetry tries to evoke those things we can sense and feel, yet not easily put into words.”
Signposts & Hedges is currently available in Portland at Selected Stories on SE Division St., Rose City Book Pub, Second Shapes, Broadway Books and Annie Bloom’s. It is also available directly from the publisher at finishinglinepress.com/shop and from other online distributors.
Author David Melville. Photo by Melville.
