Sundance

Like Sundance claims, to hit his mark,
That he must move to shoot,
So I, to do my art, move too;
The poem comes when I depart.

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Explanation

A short one this week—but, where I have short changed you in verse, I’ll repay you in prose.

The quatrain begins by introducing the character, Sundance Kid, from the 1969 film, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. These were actual historical bandits, but the poem is about the film.

There is a scene in Butch Cassidy in which Sundance tries to get work as an armed guard for a mining operation in Bolivia. He speaks with a supervisor at the mine. The miner throws a rock, or a brick of some kind, twenty feet, and asks Sundance to shoot it, to prove that he can work security.

Sundance begins a short, prefatory routine, like a basketball player dribbling twice before a free throw. The miner stops him from doing it and says “No, son, just shoot it.” Sundance fires from a stationary position, and misses.

The supervisor sneers and walks away, but then Sundance says, “I’m better when I move.” The supervisor turns around. Sundance begins the routine again. In one swift motion he draws the pistol from its holster, he crouches nearer to the ground, fires once and strikes the rock, which elevates the stone from the ground, then shoots it again in the air, shattering it.

“I’m better when I move,” says Sundance.

“Yeah,” says the miner.

He gets the job.

Lesson

I, too, am better when I move. Many of the poems you have read in this newsletter were written while walking, in whole or in part.

I strongly recommend walking when writing poems. 

(If you are able and if it is safe to do so!)

It is summer now in Toronto so walking is again a live option. I think that my production of poems slows dramatically in the winter because I do not take long walks and write while walking.

Part of the reason for this is that I often write on my phone while walking, and the winter cold invariably kills the old battery of whatever hand-me-down iPhone I’m presently pinchfisting (at the time of writing, it is an iPhone 8 that Marijke gave me when she bought her 13).

I prefer writing on my phone, though, because holding a pen and notebook is inconvenient while walking. Plus, there’s the matter of transcribing it later… writing a poem once is bad enough—but writing it twice?!

And, when people pass me, in the middle of the park, me staring at my phone, I can only imagine what they must think of me! “Look at that addict,” they probably whisper amongst themselves after they pass me, “here in the park, and still glued to Instagram!”

I am waiting for a passerby to challenge me on precisely this, so that I can tell them, “You’re mistaken! I’m writing a poem.” 

Scansion (poem stats)

Quatrain, i.e. a four line stanza

Iambic tetrameter (3 lines) and trimeter (1)

Rhyme scheme: ABBA