Not one of us can write poetry free from tradition—and if we’re hung up on being “original,” we risk writing a diminutive verse that has not feasted on the riches of the ages. We run the danger of tending poems in a fallow field, whose soil would need years of composition and decomposition in order to produce the richest yield. Only in a field where different livestock have pastured, and crops have grown, decomposed, and entered the life of the soil, will new life sprout. Tradition is the wellspring of fertility.

To the modern mind, it seems paradoxical that adhering to form can be freeing. In Andrew Frisardi’s 2020 book on Dante, Love’s Scribe: Reading Dante in the Book of Creation, he finds a parallel in the common frustration with “organized religion”:

Those who too easily dismiss orthodoxy as mere “dogmatism” ignore the essential point that truth realizes itself in the human mind within a matrix of form. Truth does not deny forms, but goes beyond them from within, much as an artist who has mastered form can discover formal freedom in creative inspiration.

Frisardi compares the freedom that form gives in poetry to the freedom given within Catholic orthodoxy, in Dante’s art specifically, in this way: The fundamental articles of faith, such as the Nicene Creed, “are like the soil in which one plants the seed of one’s thought, as it were, not cemetery ground for burying the cadaver of thought.” To “reinvent individual by individual”—or poet by poet—we’ll still be drawing on tradition; we’ll just have a much shallower creed—or in the realm of art, lesser music.

When we have a scholar-translator-poet such as Frisardi, who has tilled the fertile soil of Italy’s greatest poet for many years, and who is adept at observing our sublunar life, we’re in for a treat. In Love’s Scribe he quotes Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia, in which poetry is defined as “an invention or fiction composed through rhetoric and music.” So then, a poet makes form from language and music—both aural and oral forms themselves—woven together. And in his new poetry collection from Wiseblood Books, The Moon on Elba, Frisardi continually pleases with his deft wielding of wit, word, and song. These are poems of gentle insight and sharp wit that evince joy both in wordplay and in our strange, heartbreaking world.

The title poem of Frisardi’s collection is a good representation of the jewels he gives us: “The Moon on Elba” is a ghazal, a poem comprised of couplets with a particular rhyme scheme, its theme usually love and loss, derived from the Arabic and Persian traditions. Like many a poetic form throughout the ages—from Davidic psalms to Beowulf all the way up to jazz poetry from the likes of Langston Hughes and Dana Gioia—the ghazal would traditionally be accompanied with music. Since the seventh-century Arabian and medieval Persian poets, the form has been used in German and Spanish, Hebrew and Hindi, Turkish and English. The repetitive rhymes steadily build tension:

The moon is the sun on vacation. Peeping on Elba,
It sauntered and climbed like a vine creeping on Elba.

 

It’s been said that the moon is mad, a disturbance in blood:
Just right for soccer fans and dancers leaping on Elba.

 

It was, as usual, corrupting the parchments of light,
Or else that night would be in safe keeping, on Elba.

“That night” alludes to the “heartbreak” (from the fifth stanza) on the speaker’s mind:

Heartbreak is best in a song, but when it’s in life
And unsung, you could do worse than be weeping on Elba.

And yet the heartbreak does enter a song—this one. Note the complete thoughts of each stanza, the full stop after the rhyme. Each stanza is meant to be considered, drop by drop. The poem quietly builds its song of longing to a crescendo in the sixth couplet, and a denouement in the seventh.