My collection of tone-crafted poems is a call to song. I named it "Book of the Floating Refrain" to highlight a musical feature of each poem: the line that's repeated in every stanza appears in line 1 with stanza one, in line 2 with stanza two, and so on, till it floats down to line 5 in stanza five. Refrains were typical of the word songs a late medieval "troubadour" poet would write to his lady love, and I'm a modern troubadour who hopes to awaken in you, the reader, a liking for this noble, mellifluent, canorous craft. My dream is that, at some point, you'll put the book down and write a word song of your own. Because troubadour word song writing is an existential project, a quest, a therapy, a sensual pleasure, a means toward love and friendship, an overcomer of doubt and even a builder of character, the result is that art and life merge. A way of art-making becomes a way of life. And a word song form devoted to enhancing both art and life becomes a kind of "wisdom literature" in its intent and goal. Bidney includes a "blogatelle" (blog + bagatelle) of commentary to accompany every poem in the present book, though often the blogatelle refuses to be wholly, or even partly, written in prose and sprouts wings for its own lyrical flight!
About the Author: Martin Bidney, Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University (State University of New York at Binghamton), has published 22 books of poetry and 2 of literary criticism. Founding editor of the Dialogic Poetry Press, he also founded a new genre of literature by combining translations (from Polish, Russian, German) or presentations of traditional literary works of high value (Shakespeare's Sonnets, passages from Pickthall's translation of the Qur'an) with verse replies in forms influenced by the mentors he presents and/or translates. The "floating refrain" poem that stimulated the present book was Bidney's translation of a lyric by Norwegian poet Andre' Bjerke (with the assistance of Alexander Schlayer's German rendering). Among the authors with whom Bidney has conducted colloquies in his books of verse are Germany's greatest poet J. W. von Goethe (whose "West-East Divan" Bidney translated, adding to it another complete "divan" or verse-collection of his own in the form of commentary poems), the 19th century German lyricist and linguist Friedrich Rueckert, Poland's greatest poet Adam Mickiewicz (Bidney dialogues with the latter's "Crimean Sonnets"), the early 14th century Sufi theosopher Ibn Arabi (Bidney writes 99 sonnets embodies the latter's teachings), the later 14th century Persian poet Hafiz (Bidney's source here is Joseph von Hammer's world-class German verse renderings of Hafiz), and the biblical King Solomon (whose "Song of Songs" Bidney turned from the King James version into English rhymed and metered verse, adding 280 love lyrics of his own). He has also translated eight complete collections of verse by Nikolay Gumilev, the Russian master who visited Africa 5 times during the same period of history as the trip made by Joseph Conrad. In the 14 years of his emeritation Bidney has published 22 poetry books.