[Roger Slater]

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.

[Kate Benedict]

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!

[Catherine Tufariello]

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.

[Susan McLean]

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).]

[Gregory Dowling]

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

[Meredith Bergmann]

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

[Bill Dyes]

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

[Howard]

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.

[Gail White]

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.

[Steven Schroeder]

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

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Steve Schroeder