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
|