November 2012
I know I’m a bad person, an erudite of nothing, untutored in all but onomatopoeia and iambic pentameter, exuberant with righteous selfdom, disarranged from all scholarly consonance, heretical of history, ignorant of any recondite explanation, void of even the slightest intellective gurgle, satiated from the drone of alleged perspicacity, puerile in the art of rhythmical composition and generally revulsed by rhyming bromidic dribble.
See, even words can sometimes be a poor way to communicate. But if you try to start making things rhyme…
I’ve been blessed with writing for aviation magazines for some time now. I’ve gotten a lot of mail and e-mail over the years, most of it nice and some of it not. But the one great frustration I have is with people who think I’d like to read their aviation poetry. Let me speak to you directly: I’m sorry. I just don’t read aviation poetry.
Poets have been poeting probably since Lucy was attending raves in Olduvai Gorge. Sometime in man’s very ancient history, someone sat tinkering with words when they no doubt noticed that a couple of words sounded similar.
“Ugg,” our ancestor likely said.
“Wugg!” someone else grinned with that childlike look of discovery.
And that was it, the beginning of… poetry. It was no time at all before cavemen were making up little rhymes to tell their children at bedtime:
Mary had a little T. rex,
Its fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went
She was bummed ‘cause someone
ate her pet.
Sadly, there was no written language back then, so one can only imagine the treasure trove of cute little quatrains and couplets that await us in some cave in France (or worse, have been lost forever).
But sometime after the fall of Homo habilis and the rise of Homo erectus, our ancestors really got going on this rhyming thing. Everybody was doing it;
the latest craze.
The Greeks look swell in their armor
I’m taking a date just to charm her.
There’s a lot of cool fighters
Inside the Coliseum;
We peasants line up
Just to see ‘em.
In fact, 2,500 years ago, there was enough of this writing in verse stuff going on that Socrates himself said, “I decided that it was not wisdom that enable poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.”
Apparently Socrates’ disgust for poetry was contagious. His student, Plato, had a similar lilt and contended that “…all poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers…”.
Those guys would love the state of poetry now. Modern poems often don’t even have to rhyme, or have any meter, or worse (gasp!): no alliteration.
A vapor moves across the ink black
of the well of time,
Raising its hand to mimic the
dichotomy of flyswatters.
Who will answer a baby crying
on a mountain?
For whatever reason, poetry has just not settled into society. Few people can recite even a modicum of poetry, and those that can often can only parrot back some lines they learned shortly after being compelled to read “Beowulf.”
And yet there are poems in our everyday life that we’ve come to love.
And the rockets’ red glare
The bombs bursting in air…
Poems from the Bard are debated to this moment.
To be, or not to be:
that is the question:
Whether ‘tis nobler
in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against
a sea of troubles…
And I have to tell you I’m not so smug that I can’t appreciate the work of some of the world’s poets laureate. A great poet can paint a living, breathing picture using merely words.
But aviation poetry? After a hundred-plus years of flying, who the hell knows any aviation poems? Okay, there is one by John Gillespie Magee Jr. called “High Flight,” written in 1941.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds
of Earth
And danced the skies on
laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and
joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, —
and done a hundred things …
And after more than 100 years of flying, this is IT for aviation poems? Is this the poem you think shares the miracle of flying with others? Does this work give any insight to the joy we feel flying our airplanes? Can readers get even a hint of what’s it’s like to have your hands on the controls of a machine that actually enables us to fly, something that’s apparently been on the Human Race Bucket List since the beginning of time? No?
Then do we just give it up, this whole obsession some of us have with aviation poetry? Do we swear an oath on our third-class medicals that we’re just not doing the poetry thing anymore?
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe instead of sending poetry to the graveyard, we embrace it, use it as much as we can. Imagine the tower saying:
Cleared to land and make it snappy;
I’m one controller you can’t make happy.
Another airplane is in the pattern—
Get ‘er down and done with,
or I’ll send you to Saturn.
Or maybe a pilot report might
sound like this:
Winds aloft are nasty and bumpy.
My cheap seats make the
turbulence lumpy.
Fifty knots from the east and
right off of my nose—
Cars are passing right by me.
This flying stuff blows.
Of course, the problem with speaking in rhyme is that pretty soon we pilots would be indistinguishable from rap stars. And that’s a whole ‘nother story. Just say no to poetry; on this we must agree. Rhyming ain’t for pilots, I tell you! Honestly.
Screenwriter, philanthropist and good guy Lyn Freeman has been writing aviation articles since before John Glenn joined the Marines. He is the former editor of Plane & Pilot magazine, founder and current chairperson of the Build-a-Plane organization, a master scuba diver, a championship table tennis player and an all-around Renaissance man. Send questions or comments to editor@piperflyer.org.
