"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)