alliterative verse

I've been searching for contemporary poets writing in some form of alliterative verse. Reading various literary journals, both print and online, I've been feeling rather lonely and wondering how old fashioned my work must appear. If writing poetry is taking part in a conversation... am I just talking to myself? or talking to poets long dead or so far distanced I can't reach them? wondering if I can even answer the question "why imitate an Old English form of poetry?" Well, why write in any form? Why acknowledge any tradition?-- Part of it is that form and "content" must be in tune. But why is alliterative verse better suited to my work?

Here is Simon Armitage speaking on his translation of the Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: "to me, alliteration is the warp and weft of the poem, without which it is just so many fine threads. In some very elemental way, the story and the sense of the poem is directly located within its sound."

Of course he is speaking on the green knight specifically, his translation, and not the attempt to write original alliterative verse in modern english. But, still, this line embodies what I want to achieve: sense and sound entrenched in one another, melded together.

Or Heaney speaking on his translation of Beowulf and his interest in Old English:

"What happened was that I found in the glossary to C. L. Wrenn’s edition of the poem the Old English word meaning ‘to suffer’, the word þolian; and although at first it looked completely strange with its thorn symbol instead of the familiar th, I gradually realized that it was not strange at all, for it was the word that older and less educated people would have used in the country where I grew up. ‘They’ll just have to learn to thole,’ my aunt would say about some family who had suffered through an unforeseen bereavement. And now suddenly here was ‘thole’ in the official textual world, mediated through the apparatus of a scholarly edition, a little bleeper to remind me that my aunt’s language was not just a self-enclosed family possession but an historical heritage, one that involved the journey þolian had made north into Scotland and then across unto Ulster with the planters, and then across from the planters to the locals who had originally spoken Irish, and then farther across again when the Scots Irish emigrated to the American South in the eighteenth century."

For Heaney, the sound of old english poetry is ingrained in his family tradition, cultural tradition, and literary tradition. But I didn't grow up with Irish relatives, family members whose "words they uttered came across with a weighty distinctness, phonetic units as separate and defined as delph platters displayed on a dresser shelf." Heaney's interest in Old English is found in a sense of connection: to himself, to others that have come before him.

I too have experienced a deep familiarity in the sight and sound of the thorn. But is it anything greater than an identification or interest? Does it need to be anything deeper-- does it require a rationale? Do poets who write a series of sonnets need to justify their use of the form? (probably).

Today, searching for contemporary poets writing in alliterative verse besides Earle Birney or Seamus Heaney or Simon Armitage, I found a riddle by Carter Revard, published in 1992:

A Trinity Riddle

I spread, descending,    a samite of stars.
White fingers bring me     for breakfast Mont Blanc,
and I develop    on earth's negative
the prints proving     a presence absent.
Rainbow-dancing,    my restless soft-self
teaches the sun at     his summer turn to
reprise in dawn-prisms    the light-praise of plants,
or stars in winter     the still song-homes
with brittle jewels    dropped bright from darkness,
or shifts my shape to    a shimmering self-trap.
NOW Speak, if you spy it,    the spECIal name
I bear in spring when    I baRE TAWdry alleys
to wear till dawn night-diamonds,     till dusk the jewel of time.

***

The "solution" to this riddle is found within the text: ice, snow and water. But the imagery reveals its solution as well, the "dawn prisms" and "night-diamonds" symbolizing dew of plants, or sparkling snow. The poem emphasizes the shifting nature of water and similarly the shifting nature of language: from liquid to snow to ice, that the object can be "read" in different ways. There is also the imagery of reflection: the object "develops" on the "negative" of earth; the language of photography points to the poem's attempt to capture some aspect of the world, further heightened by the literal reflection found in the capital letters spelling out "ice" "water" and "snow" in reverse. Reading this poem, I feel renewed, inspired, lightened.

I don't know precisely what draws me to the Germanic sounds of alliterative verse, or the lighter dance of Gerard Manley Hopkins' sprung rhythm.... it is something in the caesurae dividing each half-line, and the distance and space. Something in the deep sounds, and their resonance within me. Maybe I long for the simplicity of line and inventiveness of kennings. As Szumigalski phrases it: "For want of thorn for want of edh"