V E R S E and I M A G E

[including poems about poetry]

Many more people agree they hate poetry
+++++++++++++++++than can agree what poetry is. ++§

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Poetry

I, too, dislike it.
+++ Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
+++ it, after all, a place for the genuine.

Marianne Moore
revised version from The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore, 1967, Penguin Classics

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I started this blog eleven years ago to write about poetry. Wait, no, that isn’t correct. I don’t know anything about poetry. I started this blog plagued with a vague pernicious guilt about that ignorance.

Devoid of understanding notwithstanding, I discovered several poems that kept prodding me, insistent and hungry. I turned away and turned back and there they remained. They invited their friends. I couldn’t bring myself to just toss them back out into the darkness. so I started this blog to give a few poems a little home. To decorate them. Perhaps even to exalt them. Slowly, incautiously, I allowed more and more of them to sneak through the door until they’d taken all the seats and I was the one crouched beneath the table begging.

Then I opened Ben Lerner’s little book – how could one ignore a thing titled, The Hatred of Poetry? At least once a year someone announces the death of poetry; was this book just another swain raising his sword in poetry’s defense? How was I to react to Marianne Moore’s poem smack in the center of page one? Or to understand Ben’s confession that his unbidden mantra whenever he opens a book of verse, is introduced to a poet, attends a reading, stands before his classroom, is, I, too, dislike it?

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Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”),
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

Elizabeth Alexander
from American Sublime, Graywolf Press, © 2005 by Elizabeth Alexander.

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The poet is a tragic figure, doomed to fail. The poet scrapes together such muck and detritus as we call ‘words’ to try to create a specific and personal and even universal poem, while capital-P Poetry remains lofted out of reach by angels and dreams. The actual poem never becomes all that its maker imagines for it. Bitter logic. Poetry isn’t hard, it’s impossible. Perhaps the heat of our hatred for the poem arising from our biting disappointment can yet burn off a bit of its fog.

I’m condensing all this from Ben Lerner, who writes: Our contempt for any particular poem must be perfect, be total, because only a ruthless reading that allows us to measure the gap between the actual and the virtual will enable us to experience, if not a genuine poem – no such thing – a place for the genuine, whatever that might mean.

So for eleven years I’ve written about earth-smelling gravelly stuff and let a few poems sneak in to hint at the sacred. I’ve written about salamanders, crayfish, herons, asters, lichens; about ecology, taxonomy, biochemistry; about grandchildren, aging parents, being born, dying; about suffering, gratitude, community. The poems have written about what poems write about – I can’t say exactly.

Perhaps you, dear reader, can enlighten me. Perhaps you’ll convince me that none of us understand anything about poetry and thereby absolve me of guilt. Perhaps you’ll reveal to me that the very act of creating is born in transcendent desire – to twine the intensely subjective personal with the authentic encompassing universal – and that the word we use for that desire is “Poetry.”

Perhaps. Perhaps not. At least, though, we can join Ben Lerner in this: All I ask the haters – and I, too, am one – is that they strive to perfect their contempt, bringing it to bear on poems, where it will be deepened, not dispelled, and where, by creating a place for possibility and present absences (like unheard melodies), it might come to resemble love.

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§ – quotations are from The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; New York; © 2016 by Ben Lerner

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Ars Poetica

Thirty miles to the only decent restaurant
was nothing, a blink
in the long dull stare of Wyoming.
Halfway there the unknown but terribly
important essayist yelled Stop!
I wanna be in this; and walked
fifteen yards onto the land
before sky bore down and he came running,
crying Jesus–there’s nothing out there!

I once met an Australian novelist
who told me he never learned to cook
because it robbed creative energy.
What he wanted most was
to be mute; he stacked up pages;
he entered each day with an ax.

What I want is this poem to be small,
a ghost town
on the larger map of wills.
Then you can pencil me in as a hawk:
a traveling x-marks-the-spot.

Rita Dove
from Grace Notes: Poems, W. W. Norton; first appeared in Poetry, October 1987

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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.

*

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

*

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean
But be.

Archibald MacLeish
from Collected Poems 1917-1982, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1952; © 1985 by The Estate of Archibald MacLeish.

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Poetry

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
*****Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
*****it, after all, a place for the genuine.
***********Hands that can grasp, eyes
***********that can dilate, hair that can rise
*****************if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
*****useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible
*****the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
***********do not admire what
***********we cannot understand: the bat
*****************holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
*****a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea
*******************************************************the base-
*****ball fan, the statistician—
***********nor is it valid
*****************to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make a *******************************************distinction
*****however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not
*************************************************poetry,
*****nor till the poets among us can be
***********“literalists of
***********the imagination”—above
*****************insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” shall we have
*****it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
*****the raw material of poetry in
***********all its rawness and
***********that which is on the other hand
*****************genuine, you are interested in poetry.

Marianne Moore
the “original version”

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RESOURCES:
Ben Lerner
Marianne Moore
Elizabeth Alexander
Rita Dove
Archibald MacLeish

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