"Poems about poetry" are condemned almost as often as they're written; I just got a batch of rejections containing some things that were damned for that sin. As I moped, it occurred to me that if all such poems were banned we'd have to do without Dylan Thomas's "In my craft or sullen art," one of my all-time favorites.

What are other people's all-time favorite poems about poetry? I hope you'll find this query fun to answer.

Best wishes to all,
Maryann

In addition to the fifty or sixty I've written? Here's one by Billy Collins which I like because it is (a) indirect, and (b) pertinent to some of what appears on the Sphere (as a matter of fact, I have posted it in the past to make the same point the poem makes.)

Litany

"You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine..."
-Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.

- Billy Collins



[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited February 28, 2006).]

Maryann,

Though an old topic, many of the most beautiful and passionate poems address the art of poetry itself, though they need not be written solely about poetry. Here are a couple of examples of ones I enjoy:


A BOOK of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--
O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

- Khayyam/Fitzgerald


Sonnet 106

When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rime,
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,
Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty's best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique pen would have express'd
Even such a beauty as you master now.
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring;
And for they looked but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing:
For we, which now behold these present days,
Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.


- Shakespeare

"The Mango of Poetry"
by
Lorna Goodison

I read a book
about the meaning of poetry.
The writer defines it as silence,
then breaks the lines

to construct ideas
about the building of bridges,
the reconciliation of opposites.
I'm still not sure what poetry is.

But now I think of a ripe mango
yellow ochre niceness
sweet flesh of St. Julian,
and all I want to do

is to eat one from the tree
planted by my father
three years before the sickness
made him fall prematurely.

The tree by way of compensation
bears fruit all year round
in profusion and overabundance
making up for the shortfall

of my father's truncated years.
I'd pick this mango with a cleft stick,
then I'd wash it and go to sit
upon the front wall of our yard.

I would not peel it all back
to reveal its golden entirety,
but I would soften it by rolling
it slowly between my palms.

Then I'd nibble a neat hole
at the top of the skin pouch
and then pull the pulp
up slowly into my mouth.

I'd do this all while wearing
a bombay-colored blouse
so that the stain of the juice
could fall freely upon me.

And I say that this too would be
powerful and overflowing
and a fitting definition
of what is poetry.

[This message has been edited by Howard (edited February 28, 2006).]

I know some people will groan but here it is:

Ars Poetica


A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown--

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.


as the f*
as the fA poem should be motionless in time
as the fAs the moon climbs,
as the fLeaving, as the moon releases
as the fTwig by twig the night-entangled trees,

as the fLeaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves.
as the fMemory by memory the mind--

as the fA poem should be motionless in time
as the fAs the moon climbs.


as the f*
as the fA poem should be equal to:
as the fNot true.
as the fFor all the history of grief
as the fAn empty doorway and a maple leaf.

as the fFor love
as the fThe leaning grasses and two lights above the sea--

as the fA poem should not mean
as the fBut be.

Archibald Macleish



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited February 28, 2006).]

"Landscape with Poets"
by
Miroslav Holub
(translated by Dana Habova and David Young)

Some day when
everything's at rest,
in the curly landscape painted by Rubens
as a background for Baucis and Philemon,

poets will disperse,
in dark capes and hoods,
mute as the silhouettes of milestones,
at five-hundred-yard intervals to the horizon and beyond,

and in succession
will strum their electric guitars
and say their verse, strophe, poem,
like a telegram from one stone to another,

in succession,
like automatic keys
on a pipe organ
fingered by monsoon rains,

solitary trees will
hum boskily, sheep
sill raise shaggy heads,
Orpheus underground will sound
the upper harmonic registers

and the words that float like clouds,
across the information threahold,
up to the shallow sky,
like proteinoids and oligonucleontides,
words as honest as chemical bonds,
words with the autocatalytic function,
genomic and decoding words,

and there will be
either a new form of life
or, possibly,
nothing.



[This message has been edited by Howard (edited February 28, 2006).]

"Can Poetry Matter?"
by Stephen Dobyns

Heart feels the time has come to compose lyric poetry.
No more storytelling for him. Oh, Moon, Heart writes,
sad wafer of the heart's distress. and then: Oh, Moon,
bright cracker of the heart's pleasure. Which is it,
is the moon happy or sad, cracker or wafer? He looks
from the window but the night is overcast. Oh, Cloud,
he writes, moody veil of the Moon's distress. And then,
Oh, Cloud, sweet scarf of the Moon's repose. Once more
Heart asks, Are clouds kindly or a bother, is the moon sad
or at rest? He calls scientists who tell him that the moon
is a dead piece of rock. He calls astrologers. One says
the moon means water. Another that it signifies oblivion.
The girl next door says the Moon means love. The nut
up the block says it proves Satan has us under his thumb.
Heart goes back to his notebooks. Oh, Moon,, he writes,
confusing orb meaning one thing or another. Heat feels
that his words lack conviction. Then he hits on a solution.
Oh, Moon, immense hyena of introverted motorboat.
Oh, Moon, upside down lamppost of barbershop quartet.
Heart takes his lines to a critic who tells him that the poet
is recounting a time as a toddler when he saw his father
kissing the baby-sitter at the family's cottage on a lake.
Obviously, the poem explains the poet's fear of water.
Heart is ecstatic. He rushes home to continue writing.
Oh, Cloud, raccoon cadaver of colored crayon, angel spittle
recast as foggy euphoria. Heart is swept up by the passion
of composition. Freed from the responsibility of content,
no nuance of nonsense can be denied him. Soon his poems
appear everywhere, while the critic writes essays elucidating
Heart's meaning. Jointly they form a sausage factory of poetry:
Heart supplying the pig snouts and rectal tissue of language
which the critic encloses in a thin membrane of explication.
Lyric poetry means teamwork, thinks Heart: a hog farm,
corn field, and two old dobbins pulling a buckboard of song.

(from Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides, 1999)

[This message has been edited by Howard (edited February 28, 2006).]

Ballade Beginning with a Line by Robert Bly


My heart is a calm potato by day.
My feet are three Belgian nuns by night.
My fingers are speed-bumps in my way
When I'm screwing onions in for light.
My tongue is a shoeless duck; my right
Elbow's a celibate tv star.
My navel's a stick of dynamite.
I don't know what my metaphors are.

My son is a half-eaten cr�me brul�.
My daughters are all under copyright.
My wife's a convertible full of hay
In a small, abandoned nuclear site.
My father's a ten-round welterweight fight
With my mother, who isn't a Mason jar.
My family tree is a concrete kite.
I don't know what my metaphors are.

My books are chickens who kneel to pray
In a Unitarian solstice rite.
Each page is a gun-shy manta ray,
Each word an Arabian parasite,
Each letter an oyster-knife that might
Plunge fatally into a Hershey bar.
My poems are clocks with an appetite.
I don't know what my metaphors are.

Prince, pray for all those who have to write:
My brain is a clam's unlit cigar.
My ear is a cheese with an overbite.
I don't know what my metaphors are.

--Sam Gwynn

Poetry For Supper

“Listen, now, verse should be as natural
As the small tuber that feeds on muck
And grows slowly from obtuse soil
To the white flower of immortal beauty.”

“Natural, hell! What was it Chaucer
Said once about the long toil
That goes like blood to the poem’s making?
Leave it to nature and the verse sprawls,
Limp as bindweed, if it break at all
Life’s iron crust. Man, you must sweat
And rhyme your guts taut, if you’d build
Your verse a ladder.”

“You speak as though
No sunlight ever surprised the mind
Groping on its cloudy path.”

“Sunlight's a thing that needs a window
Before it enter a dark room.
Windows don't happen.”

So two old poets,
Hunched at their beer in the low haze
Of an inn parlour, while the talk ran
Noisily by them, glib with prose.

— R. S. Thomas

"Description"
by
Mark Doty

My salt marsh
-- mine, I call it, because
these day-hammered fields

of dazzled horizontals
undulate, summers,
inside me and out --

how can I say what it is?
Sea lavender shivers
over the tidewater steel.

A million minnows ally
with their million shadows
(lucky we'll never need

to know whose is whose).
The bud of storm loosens:
watered paint poured

dark blue onto the edge
of the page. Haloed grasses,
gilt shadow-edged body of dune . . .

I can go on like this.
I love the language
of the day's ten thousand aspects,

the creases and flecks
in the map, these
brilliant gouaches.

But I'm not so sure it's true,
what I was taught, that through
the particular's the way

to the universal:
what I need to tell is
swell and curve, shift

and blur of boundary,
tremble and spilling over,
a heady purity distilled

from detail. A metaphor, then:
in this tourist town,
the retail legions purvey

the far-flung world's
bangles: brilliance of Nepal
and Mozambique, any place

where cheap labor braids
or burnishes or hammers
found stuff into jewelry's

lush grammar,
a whole vocabulary
of ornament: copper and lacquer,

shells and seeds from backwaters
with fragrant names, millefiori
milled into African beads, Mexican abalone,

camelbone and tin, cinnabar
and verdigris, silver,
black onyx, coral,

gold: one vast conjugation
of the verb
to shine.

And that
is the marsh essence --
all the hoarded rishes

of the world held
and rivering, a gleam
awakened and doubled

by water, flashing
off the bowing of the grass.
Jewelry, tides, language:

things that shine. What is description, after all,
but encoded desire?

And if we say
the marsh, if we forge
terms for it, then isn't it

contained in us,
a little,
the brightness?

(from Atlantis, 1995)

As long as we're daring to post free verse, here is a favorite of mine that at least starts out as "about poetry" but takes us in a quite different direction...or does it? (pasted from the net, and I'm not confident that all the capitalized lines should be capitalized, and I question some punctuation, but you get the idea):

The Routine Things Around The House
by Stephen Dunn

When Mother died
I thought: now I'll have a death poem.
That was unforgivable.

Yet I've since forgiven myself
as sons are able to do
who've been loved by their mothers.

I stared into the coffin
knowing how long she'd live,
how many lifetimes there are

in the sweet revisions of memory.
It's hard to know exactly
how we ease ourselves back from sadness,

but I remembered when I was twelve,
1951, before the world
unbuttoned its blouse.

I had asked my mother (I was trembling)
if I could see her breasts
and she took me into her room

without embarrassment or coyness
and I stared at them,
afraid to ask for more.

Now, years later, someone tells me
Cancers who've never had mother love
are doomed and I, a Cancer

feel blessed again. What luck
to have had a mother
who showed me her breasts

when girls my age were developing
their separate countries,
what luck

she didn't doom me
with too much or too little.
Had I asked to touch,

Perhaps to suck them,
what would she have done?
Mother, dead woman

Who I think permits me
to love women easily
this poem

is dedicated to where
we stopped, to the incompleteness
that was sufficient

and to how you buttoned up,
began doing the routine things
around the house.

Hah, that Ballade by Gwynne beginning with Bly's "My heart is a calm potato by day" is a knee slapper!

Anne Sexton once wrote "My heart is a kitten of butter." Some of those mid-C poets took too many drugs, man.


My heart is a kitten of butter.
My thighs are sparrows of sauce.
My womb is an aphid of udder.
Don't get what I'm saying? Your loss!

Greg Williamson is a master in this genre. I think I might have seen "Origami," from Errors in the Script, posted here before. Here is another tour de force from Greg's first book, The Silent Partner.

Chant Royal

One of modern architecture’s greatest failings has been its
lack of interest in the relationship of the building to the sky.
One doubts that a poem was ever written to a flat-roofed building
silhouetted against the setting sun. Paul Randolph


Imagine the architect’s early discontent
With wooden blocks or musty counterpane
Draping across the table like a tent,
Already found too flimsy and mundane
For a girl who dreamed of spires and tower clocks,
Looking across the domed and pitched terrain
Of roofs. And now to stand in a great glass building
And stare down on the glistening gridlocks
And contemplate the job she’s just begun:
To diagram another flat-roofed building
Silhouetted against the setting sun.

Late nights deciphering each document,
Learning the books, the styles, the fine arcane
Refinements of the guild; what keen torment
To look across the panoramic chain
Of burger shops, the whitebread Bun-in-a-Box,
Closed circuit malls and movieplex, domain
Of the hopelessly bored, who cruise a tinsel building
As in some sleek flourescent Skinner box
Of Muzak, mirrors, and shiny three-for-one
Diamelle displays in a flat-roofed building
Silhouetted against the setting sun.

She’d seen a couple in one of those cement
And I-beam towers, wrapped in cellophane
To look like televisions, where the vent
Exhales a sibilant, chalky Novocain
To feed the plastic ferns and gleaming locks
Of lacquered hair. She had seen their smiles drain
Like Pepsi, as they mounted a desk, building
A rhythm: her legs in the air, he stood in his socks.
They banged and sobbed and screamed for all or none,
Fucking for dear life in a flat-roofed building
Silhouetted against the setting sun.

The gimcrack sprawls across the continent:
Doomed kitchenettes in simulated grain,
The paste and paper condos made to rent,
In which each standard untrimmed windowpane
Is rattling and all the plumbing knocks—
Threatening to melt with the first good rain,
Like giant tracts of sugar cubes they’re building.
But down below, somehow, on streets and docks
The Fades and Crew Cuts get the workdays done,
Like some austere and silent flat-roofed building
Silhouetted against the setting sun.

She imagines that anonymous Resident
Picking up his mail, the brood of inane
Blow-ins that flutter from a supplement,
A hardware owner putting on the chain
At a block and panel storage room, and flocks
Of dusky birds at windbreaks on the plain
Where cattle nose away and storms are building.
She thinks of nightshift boys who check the stocks
And of putting up her feet on an empty tun
On the terrace of her sublet flat-roofed building
Silhouetted against the setting sun.

Out at the county line, the sun is gilding
The causeway, where a shed of cinderblocks
Houses the antiquated pumps that run,
And go on running, in a flat-roofed building
Silhouetted against the setting sun.

There are many poems on poetry that I find memorable. Here are two by Robert Francis.

Catch

Two boys uncoached are tossing a poem together,
Overhand, underhand, backhand, sleight of hand, everyhand,
Teasing with attitudes, latitudes, interludes, altitudes,
High, make him fly off the ground for it, low, make him stoop,
Make him scoop it up, make him as-almost-as possible miss it,
Fast, let him sting from it, now, now fool him slowly,
Anything, everything tricky, risky, nonchalant,
Anything under the sun to outwit the prosy,
Over the tree and the long sweet cadence down,
Over his head, make him scramble to pick up the meaning,
And now, like a posy, a pretty one plump in his hands.

--Robert Francis


The Pitcher

His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,

His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.

The others throw to be comprehended. He
Throws to be a moment misunderstood.

Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.

Not to, yet still, still to communicate
Making the batter understand too late.

--Robert Francis



[This message has been edited by Susan McLean (edited March 02, 2006).]

The Aim Was Song

Before man came to blow it right
The wind once blew itself untaught,
And did its loudest day and night
In any rough place where it caught.

Man came to tell it what was wrong:
It hadn't found the place to blow;
It blew too hard--the aim was song.
And listen--how it ought to go!

He took a little in his mouth,
And held it long enough for north
To be converted into south,
And then by measure blew it forth.

By measure. It was word and note,
The wind the wind had meant to be--
A little through the lips and throat.
The aim was song--the wind could see.

Robert Frost

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire and demon- his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines
Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape,
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years, of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more or less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.


Edna St. Vincent Millay 1947

Ms. Corbett

There is an anthology of poems written exclusively about poetry which I like very much. It is titled '"What Will Suffice" Contemporary American Poets on the Art of Poetry' edited by Christopher Buckley and Christopher Merrill. I believe it appeared in 1995. It begins with a remarkable poem by Czeslaw Milosz called "Art Poetica?".

I, personally, have never objected to poems written about poetry but I have continually come across many others, not excluding editors, who dislike that practice.

Bill

There's also This Art: Poems About Poetry, edited by Michael Wiegers, Copper Canyon Press, 2003.

One of the pieces included in this volume is Gregory Orr's "Some Part of the Lyric":

Sme part of the lyric wants to exclude
the world with all its chaos and grief
and so conceives shapes (a tear, a globe of dew)

whose cool symmetries create a mood
of security. which is something all need
and so, the lyric's urge to exclude

what hurts us isn't simply a crude
defense, but an embracing of a few
essential shapes: a tear, a globe of dew.

But to what end? are there clues
in these forms to deeper mysteries
that no good poem should exclude?

What can a stripped art reveal is a nude
more naked than the eye can see?
Can a tear freed of salt be a globe of dew?

And most of all -- is it something we can use?
Yes, but only as long as its beauty,
like that of a tear or a globe of dew,
reflects the world it meant to exclude.

I think poets write so many poems about poetry because in our high specialized world, few people can describe a trade other than their own.

I have to admit that my favorite poem about poetry is by Kipling. I quote from memory and am leaving out the Cockney accent:

When Homer smote his blooming lyre,
He'd heard men sing by land and sea,
And what he thought he might require
He went and took - the same as me.

The market girls and fisher men,
The shepherds and the sailors too,
They heard old songs turn up again,
But kept it quiet - same as you.

They knew he stole, he knew they knowed;
They didn't tell nor make a fuss
But winked at Homer down the road,
And he winked back - the same as us.

Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

--Howard Nemerov

------------------
Steve Schroeder

Steve, that Nemerov poem is one of my all-time favorites, and I tend to wave it around in front of people who demand to know the difference between poetry and "cut-up prose."

Here's another good one. I know nothing about the poet except that her book won the Washington House Publishing Prize in 1985, but I admire the heck out of this poem:


The Mother In Line 28

The poem is not the poet.
The mother in line 28
is not the poet's mother or child
and each time a poem opens a door
to a room of pans or pearls
it is the poem's room;
it is the poet's plan.

The heart that is bleeding
in stanza two
is not the heart of the poet.
The poet is elsewhere,
singing along with a piano player.
The heart in the poem won't heal.
The poet's own heart is strong.

--Elaine Magarell

From "On Hogback Mountain,"
pub by Washington Writers Publishing House, 1985


Marilyn


------------------
Marilyn L. Taylor

[This message has been edited by Marilyn Taylor (edited March 22, 2006).]

Marilyn,

That's a fine poem. Good to see you here. I hope your next posting on this site is not going to be in 2010.

On a slightly different note, here's one by John Whitworth:

They Fuck You Up, Do Publishers
(A Farewell to Secker and Warburg)

They fuck you up do publishers.
Against them there is no defence.
No letter, postcard, phone-call stirs
The puddle of their indolence.

Each author's fucked up in his turn.
Each contract is a poison pellet.
And specially must poets learn
That verse don't sell, and they don't sell it.

Man hands on manuscript to man,
Who leaves the thing in St Tropez.
Get out as quickly as you can
And write a television play.

(from Tennis and Sex and Death, Peterloo 1989)

Gregory

So much great stuff on this thread! The Whitworth-after- Larkin is painfully brilliant, Gregory.

Here's one from Stanley Kunitz (from Passing Through: The Later Poems..)

The Round


Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees;
this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me.

So I have shut the doors of my house,
so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,
so i am sitting in semi-dark
hunched over my desk
with nothing for a view
to tempt me
but a bloated compost heap,
steamy old stinkpile,
under my window;
and I pick my notebook up
and I start to read aloud
the still-wet words I scribbled
on the blotted page:
"Light splashed..."

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.

*********************

Christine.

This thread is awesome. So much good stuff. Of course, it's much hard to write a good poem about poetry than it is to read a good poem about poetry.

Blackberry Eating
Galway Kinnell


I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry -- eating in late September.

-Dan

Pope's "Essay on Criticism." Hands down.

Too long to post so here's a reminder:
http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.a...095&poem=32941

What we need is an anthology on that forbidden of forbiddens, (good) poems on poetry. (Does one exist already?)

Robin

P.S. Hey! I just noticed I have TWO stars! Wow!



[This message has been edited by Robin-Kemp (edited March 31, 2006).]

Lawrence Ferlinghetti:


Constantly Risking Absurdity

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of the day
performing entrachats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence



[This message has been edited by RCL (edited March 31, 2006).]

"The Chief Speaks"
by
Marin Sorescu
(Translated from the Romanian by
John Hartley Williams & Hilde Ottschofski)

Write, write! Read, read! Poetry heapbig communication energy discharge. Quick mindheart trail. Poetry medicine man go nailbed trance. Him continuous selfelectricity bliss. Ulululu! Hurtmyflesh! Learn poetry blanket smokeverse. Bigtime startnew! Read doublesided nature joypain! Read poetryearthmaker joymessage! Good vibrations!

Me long time poetry medicine man. Whiteman knowledge no true shaman guessknowledge. Whiteman firemouth iron horse knowledge. Me go tribeheart highpeak mystery hunting ground. Make good smokeverse. Send bigstrong heap powerful tribestory message. Whiteman firejourney nowhere. Poetrytribe goodplace storysmoke anywhere.

Me nothing-else-to-do man. Me poetryman. Me nothing-else-to-do poetrymysterycracker man. Go highpeak hunting ground. Crack heapbig mysterynut!

Whiteman not worry mysterygone. Whiteman not care lose mysterynut. Me find it. Make goodcloud poetrystory. Make strongbrave poetrystory. Make cloudspirit mysterycrack poetrystory. Heapgood vibrations. Oweee!

Oldtime poetrysmoke make reader happy. Oldtime versemusic good spellthing. Tribe listen. Tribe dance. Oldtime poetrymedicine man lose magicpoetryspell. Oldtime poetrymagicspell go faroffplace. Tribe no listen. Tribe no dance. Tribe go fishing. Tribe play lacrosse. Tribe drink heapbig firewater. Heapbig sadtribe falldown falldown. Need poetrymagic ear reading! Need poetrymagic listen reading! Ulululu! Oweee!

Oldtime storybook poetryman longtime dead. Newtime poetryman no good tribe mysteryspeak. Newtime poetryman need bigreaderfriend. Newtime poetryman need listenreader. Newtime poetryman heapbig difficult situation.

Earthmaker say newtime come. Earthmaker say newtime no bigfriend reader yesterdaytribestuff! Quick quick oldtime smokeverse poetryman! Make memory newshape! Ulululu! Oldtime smokeverse poetryman him bigload heavy steephill poetrywalk! Him no like walkheavy uphill. Earthmaker bigfriend oldtime poetryman. Earthmaker say poetryman make newtime quickquick. Make newtime downhill whizzfast cloud true! Make walklight uphill whizzfast skynew! Ulululu! Oweee!

Bigfriend poetryreader! How!

Thanks, Michael, for the Billy Collins, and Daniel for the Kinnell. Those are favorites of mine too. Here's one from a young contemporary sonnet-master:


And Then There Is That Incredible Moment,

when you realize what you’re reading,
what’s being revealed to you, how it is not
what you expected, what you thought
you were reading, where you thought you were heading.
Then there is that incredible knowing
that surges up in you, speeding
your heart; and you swear you will keep on reading,
keep on writing until you find another not going
where you thought—and until you have taken
someone on that ride, so that they take in
their breath, so that they let out their
sigh, so that they will swear
they will not rest until they too
have taken someone the way they were taken by you.

--Kate Light


[This message has been edited by Christine Robins (edited April 01, 2006).]

This thread can't possibly go on a minute longer without Wordsworth's splendid tribute to the sonnet, which was almost solely responsible for bringing the form back into fashion in the 19th c! Here it is:

Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells;
In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

Marilyn

This thread wants the following meta-poem on it:

The Thought-Fox by Ted Hughes

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

I see we all appreciate the meta poem, but only secretly
in this day and age. They truly are dreadful
when they're bad...

A belated warm welcome to Marilyn, a thanks to Maryann
for starting this thread, (Ralph, I love Ferlinghetti's 'speadeagled in the empy air'), and some bits from Marge Piercy's "Teaching Experience", which I wouldn't call GOOD, but certainly good,and worth a mention here, for its insistence on the physical.


One is cracking his knuckles,
another glares at me,
another is stoned and slumps
on the end of her spine,
the fourth is rehearsing the balcony
scene, the fifth is pricing
my clothing piece by piece.

I could show you how
to prune a grapevine, I could
show you how to roast a goose
wasting nothing, not the bones
for soup or the fat rendered
its sweet aroma spreading.
I could show you the red eye
of Antares, I could show you
where the marsh hawk builds
her gawky nest, how to follow
through the banks and paper thickets
the spore of a corporate
choice in damaged genes.

In these rooms words float
devoid of their shadows in action.
Teach poetry ? Learn how
to wring the neck of a chicken,
how to sustain orgasm, learn
how to build and mend. In universities
one learns about universities,
in jail about jail. If in poetry
all you learn is words,
you pass wind.

Breath is the life.
Breathe words that move you
out, that speed your blood and slow
it, but use your hands, use
your back, use the long muscles
of your legs, use the twin
lobes of forebrain and the wise
snake coiled on your spine.
Let words be born from you
wet and kicking. Let them cry,
but you, keep quiet and moving.

`````````



[This message has been edited by wendy v (edited April 03, 2006).]

Ode

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

-- Arthur O'Shaughnessy

Marion,
It's nothing like as good without the Elgar accompaniment.
Gregory

A lot of interesting poems--some marvelous, some godawful. Here are two that may interest you. The first is my version of Borges' contribution to the subject:

THE ART OF POETRY

To look at the river made of time and water
And to remember time is another river,
To know that we too vanish like the river
And that our faces flow away like water.

To feel that being awake is another sleep
That dreams it is not dreaming, that the death
That spreads fear in our flesh is the very death
That we die every night and call sleep.

To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of all the days of man and of his years,
And to transpose the insult of the years
Into a music, a murmuring, a symbol.

To see in death a sleep, or in the sunset
A golden sadness--such is poetry,
Beggared yet immortal, poetry
That comes back like the dawn and like sunset.

Sometimes, in late afternoon, a face
Looks at us from the depths of a dark mirror;
Art ought to be like that unblinking mirror
Revealing to each of us his own true face.

They say Ulysses, sick and tired of marvels,
Wept with love at the sight of Ithaca,
Green and simple. Art is that Ithaca
Of simple green eternity, not marvels.

And it is also like the unending river,
Going yet staying, mirror of the same
Inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
And yet another, like the unending river.

'

And here's one of mine, not in the same class at all, but
not contemptible:

FISHING AROUND

Keeping his feet, a feeling in his gut,
Heart in his mouth, a slow bee in his bonnet,
Silently groaning under God knows what,
He wants to see if he can write a sonnet:
Nothing spectacular, just some decent verse,
Each phoneme brooded on, each syllable weighed,
The diction plain, the sentence fairly terse
(To please you, lovely reader, meter-made).

And now he feels he's in his element,
Baiting a hook and casting forth the line,
And through clear water sees a heaven-sent
Swift flash of silver rise into air and shine.
Ah, let it go—-go, dart back to the deep.
A lovely thing, but much too small to keep.

(That wonderful elaborate pun in line 8 I borrowed from my late friend Henri Coulette.)


S

Fun thread. As I mentioned on the "Discerning Eye" board, Timothy Steele's fine new book Toward the Winter Solstice includes a poem, "A Muse," about poetic inspiration. It appears his muse is a harsh (or at least stand-offish and unpredictable) mistress!

I don't know if it's appropriate to post the poem here, since the book is just out, and the poem is also in the current issue of The Threepenny Review. But you can find it on Threepenny's website at this link:
http://www.threepennyreview.com/samp...eele_sp06.html

Another poem about poetry that I like is Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Populist Manifesto," in which he urges contemporary poets to stop speaking in code directed only to other poets, to come down out of their towers, and again be Whitman's wild children and swingers of birches. You can find it at this link:
http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.a...745&poem=31768

Robert Mezey,
A warm thanks for showing above the battlements and yes, damn it, this meter-made loved the hendecasyllabics. Or were they? They are in Greekish anyhow. How closely must one cling to make a breathing poem? If one wants to avoid an eternal Bolero? I presume the form of the first is a faithful translation of Borges' original.
Janet



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited April 28, 2006).]

Janet,
You mean the Borges poem? It's straight pentameter, and for
masochistic and sentimental reasons, I kept strictly to Fitzgerald's "Rubiyat", rhyming exactly and using no metrical
variations that he didn't use. Borges does the same thing in Spanish, though of course he can't begin to sound anything like Fitzgerald. I'm glad you mentioned the poem, becauee I think it is perhaps the finest "ars poetica" since Horace.
(I must say that I thought the Collins and Bly attempts, and some others, were pretty awful, and yes, that MacLeish poem does make me groan: almost everything he says about a poem strikes me as wrong or untrue. For example, a poem must mean AND be. Being is not worth much if it's meaningless.)

Robert,
Of course the Borges is in IP. I had been reading a lot of Sapphics etc and your/Borges? line endings achieve a similar ritualistic chanting effect. My mistake and apologies for my rushed reading.


May I be an intermediary between you and MacLeish and suggest that if a poem's meaning adds up to more than journalism it is because it has achieved a state of "being"? I have read poems that have little meaning but a strong presence and others with nothing but meaning and no presence. I agree with you except to say that if one thing can be dispensed with it is, in the end, "meaninng". I am often exasperated by online comments that want more information. I usually feel that less information would strengthen the poem.

Again my humble apologies for my Greek reading of your quite wonderful translation of Borges. Both of you travelled in time so the mistake was probably not as far out as all that. The poem is about that after all and has far more "being" than most I have read. Thanks for it.
Janet

Both the Borges-Mezey and the Mezey are impressive. But I’m confused by the reference to Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat, whose quatrains rhyme aaxa, whereas The Art of Poetry goes abab with word identity rather than standard rhyme.

Dear Henry Quince,
You're quite right---"The Art of Poetry" has nothing to do with Fitzgerald's Rubiyat: it was late at night and I had a senior moment. Borges did write a Rubiyat, and in my translation I did keep pretty strictly to Fitxgerald's prosodic structure. For your interest, I'll copy it out:

RUBIYAT

Now let my voice take up the Persian's verse
And call to mind that time is the diverse
Inweaving of the eager dreams we are,
Dreams that the Secret Dreamer shall disperse.

Let it proclaim once more that fire is ash
And flesh is dust, the river's casual splash
The fleeting image of your life and mine
That slowly, slowly vanish, in a flash.

Let it repeat that pride's elaborate tower
Is like the passing breeze, the blowing flower,
That to the radiance of the Eternal One
A century is briefer than an hour.

Say once more that the nightingale, as bright
And clear as gold in the echoing vault of night,
Sings only once; nor do the frugal stars
Fritter away their treasury of light.

And let the moon come back into the lines
Your patient hand sets down, just as it shines
At blue dawn in your garden. That same moon
Seeks you in vain among the columbines.

Under the moon that rises early or late
On tender evenings, learn to imitate
The simple wells on whose reflecting face
A few eternal images circulate.

Come back, O Persian moon, shine overhead,
And hazy golds the empty twilights shed.
Today is yesterday. You are all those
Whose faces are now dust. You are the dead.