Robert Creeley on Rhyming

[book] Was That a Real Poem or Did You Just Make It Up Yourself? (1976) by Robert Creeley:

Onward then, multiple men, women too, will go with you--boohoo. Which is a poem because I say so, it rhymes. That was a primary requisite for years and years. But so lovely when such rhyming, that congruence of sounds which occur in time with sufficient closeness, to resound, echo, and so recall, when that moves to delight and intensity, feeling the physical quality of the words' movement with a grace that distorts nothing.

The Rain from Selected Poems (1991):

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent--
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

More Creeley here.

The Obama Inaugural Poem

[poem] Praise Song for the Day by Elizabeth Alexander: A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration

Adam Kirsch on Elizabeth Alexander's Bureaucratic Verse: Alexander has reminded us of what Angelou's, Williams's, and even Robert Frost's inauguration poems already proved: that the poet's place is not on the platform but in the crowd, that she should speak not for the people but to them.

There was an extraordinary burden of expectation attached to Alexander's poem; I don't recall Maya Angelou or Miller Williams, the poets who read at Bill Clinton's inaugurations, getting the kind of attention that Alexander received in the last few weeks. The reason, I think, is that Obama's inauguration was just the kind of event that might inspire genuine poetry: it was that rare moment when the public intersected with the private for good instead of evil. And of course, Obama himself has often been cast as a "poetic" figure, thanks to his eloquence and the appeal of his image.

Charles Bernstein's 'Poetry Bailout' Statement

[via Grand Text Auto] Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers by Charles Bernstein: From a statement read at an event marking the release of Best American Poetry 2008...

Let there be no mistake: the fundamentals of our poetry are sound. The problem is not poetry but poems. The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt—poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance. Illiquid poetry assets are choking off the flow of imagination that is so vital to our literature. When the literary system works as it should, poetry and poetry assets flow to and from readers and writers to create a productive part of the cultural field. As toxic poetry assets block the system, the poisoning of literary markets has the potential to damage our cultural institutions irreparably.

Michael Symmons Roberts on Science and Poetry

Michael Symmons Roberts talks to New Scientist (2007) on science and poetry.

'The Box' (poem read in the above video) from Corpus (2004):

In case of catastrophe,
winter can be recreated
from this skeleton of leaf.

All the bitter subtleties
of crab apple are tangled
here, as is the DNA

of dew-point calibration
of the second when a tree
lets go, the recipe for clouds

on the horizon like a new
born mountain range,
like north itself.

And with the leaf,
this relic box contains
a hair curl from a child

to reconstruct humanity,
though all the lights and currents
of his soul are lost to us.

Spores, antennae, claws,
the box will hold all evolution.
It will be full and empty.

More of his poems from The Poetry Archive.

Favourite Derek Walcott Poem

'Love After Love' (year unknown) by Derek Walcott:

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

James Fenton on Douglas Dunn

'Goodbye to All That?' from The Strength of Poetry (2001) by James Fenton:

There was a time when, given the belief that empire was an absurdity and 'all that was in the past', a poet like Douglas Dunn could write his 'Poem in Praise of the British' confident that his ironies were shared....One could say of it that it takes nothing seriously, is unshockable and untroubled. The past is this wonderful absurdity. the politicians of the Right are not to be feared. We are living in this wonderful afterglow, and all is well. One of the things one would not have guessed about Terry Street when it came out was that its author was Scottish. In fact, given that most of the poems in the book are about a working-class district in Hull, one might perhaps have supposed him English. 'A Poem in Praise of the British' was untypical of its volume, but not untypical of the way Dunn later wrote at times, when he wrote as if he were expressing himself in French, in an easygoing, dandyish way of which sometimes tempted him. But what is absolutely untypical of the later Dunn is the insouciance with which he treats the subject of empire. Within ten years, in the volume called Barbarians, which shows the influence of the hard revolutionary Left, you find a poem called 'Empires' which might alos have been written to remedy the defects in seriousness of the earlier one....Soldiers are no longer funny. Empire is no longer an amusing mystery. By now Dunn has begun to think of himself as a barbarian to idenitfy with the victims of empire. And this phase gives way to a further phase in which, to a great extent, his Scottishness becomes his subject matter. He returns to his roots.

'A Poem in Praise of the British' (quoted in the above essay) from Terry Street (1969) by Douglas Dunn:

The regiments of dumb gunners go to bed early.
The soldiers, sleepy after running up and down
The private British Army meadows,
Clean the daisies off their mammoth boots.
The general goes pink in his bath reading
Lives of the Great Croquet Players.
At Aldershot, beside foot-stamping squares,
Young officers drink tea and touch their toes.

Heavy rain everywhere washes up the bones of British
Where did all that power come from, the wish
To be inert, but rich and strong, to have too much?
Where does glory come from, and when it's gone
Why are old soldiers sour and the banks empty?
But how sweet is the weakness after Empire
In the garden of a flat, safe country shire,
Watching the beauty of the random, spare, superfluous,

Drifting as if in sleep to the ranks of memorialists
That wait like cabs to take us off down easy street,
To the redcoat armies, and the flags and treaties
In the marvellous archives, preserved like leaves in books.
The archivist wears a sword and clipped moustache.
He files our memories, more precious than light,
To be of easy access to politicians of the Right,
Who are now sleeping, like undertakers on black cushions.

Garrison Keillor Reads Anthony Hecht

Garrison Keillor reads The Ceremony of Innocence from Collected Later Poems (2004) by Anthony Hecht.

He was taken from his cell, stripped, blindfolded,
And marched to a noisy room that smelled of sweat.
Someone stamped on his toes; his scream was stopped
By a lemon violently pushed between his teeth
And sealed with friction tape behind his head.
His arms were tied, the blindfold was removed
So he could see his tormentors, and they could see
The so-much-longed-for terror in his eyes.
And one of them said, "The best part of it all
Is that you won't even be able to pray."
When they were done with him, two hours later,
They learned that they had murdered the wrong man
And this made one of them thoughtful. Some years after,
He quietly severed connections with the others
Moved to a different city, took holy orders,
And devoted himself to serving God and the poor,
While the intended victim continued to live
On a walled estate, sentried around the clock
By a youthful, cell phone-linked praetorian guard.

Mary Gilmore's Little Shoes That Died

The Collected Verse of Mary Gilmore: Mary Gilmore was Australia's foremost woman poet during the first half of the twentieth century and it was as a poet that she wanted to be remembered when she died in 1962. More attention however has been given in recent years to her long and eventful life, her role as feminist, her championing of Australian literature as an instrument of national identity and her activism for various forms of social justice.

'The Little Shoes That Died': Also included in the anthology Hell and After (2005) edited by Les Murray:

These are the little shoes that died.
     We could not keep her still,
But all day long her busy feet
     Danced to her eager will.

Leaving the body's loving warmth,
     The spirit ran outside;
Then from the shoes they slipped her feet,
     And the little shoes died.

Shakespeare and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

[via Cosmic Variance, poem] Sonnet 64 by William Shakespeare:

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Shakespeare and Thermodynamics: Dam the Second Law by Frank L Lambert: This web page is for individuals in the humanities and the arts or business and the legal professions so that they can sense the remarkable importance of activation energies in understanding the working of our second-law world.

Two Cultures: Websites relating to the Snow-Leavis Controversy.

Edwin Morgan on Iain Crichton Smith

The Contribution of Iain Crichton Smith (2000) by Edwin Morgan:

Things that restrict and stifle have always been Smith’s target. In his own upbringing, the long arm of the Free Church became the focus of deep feelings of enmity which permeate many of his poems. The claim to be right, the claim to have the truth, the despising of pleasure, the indifference to art, the willingness to condemn and if possible punish the slightest backsliding, the inability to compromise, and perhaps worst of all, the incomprehension of any conception of creative change or growth: these were damning factors in Smith’s eyes.

'The Gaelic Proverb' (quoted in the above essay):

The Gaelic proverb says,
sad is the state of the house
without a child or cat.

But sad is the state of the child
who carries his house on his back
like a trapped snail.

And the cat who cannot go out
into the deep greenery
but sits on the spinster's lap
narrow and infertile,
as the wild sun goes down.

[pdf] Real People in a Real Place (1982): The islander has never had the chance of staying where he is: history has condemned him to departure, and afterwards to the choice of whether or not to return.

The Wislawa Szymborska Remix

[video] Wislawa Szymborska on the Szymon Majewski Show.

Stephen Dobyns on Yannis Ritsos

Ritsos and the Metaphysical Moment in Best Words, Best Order (1996) by Stephen Dobyns:

For Ritsos, what is important is that a connection is made between human beings and that our lives have been increased. This is his business as a poet: to help us live by awakening us to something beyond the mundane, by trying to connect us to a mystery that his poems celebrate.

The Meaning of Simplicity from Ritsos in Parentheses (1979) translated by Edmund Keeley:

I hide behind simple things that you may find me;
if you don't find me, you'll find the things,
you'll touch what my hand has touched,
the imprints of our hands will merge.

The August moon glitters in the kitchen
like a pewter pot (it becomes like this because of what I tell you)
it lights up the empty house and the kneeling silence of the house--
always the silence remains kneeling.

Every word is a way out
for an encounter often canceled,
and it's then a word is true, when it insists on a meeting.

Three more from The Negatives of Silence (1987).

James Longenbach on Jorie Graham

The Wasted Land: Longenbach's review of Sea Change (2007) by Jorie Graham:

In Sea Change, Graham traffics in large statements ('the / end of the world can be imagined', 'fish are starving to death in the Great Barrier Reef'), but at times her thought can seem muddled, her diction puzzlingly imprecise, as when she writes that love is 'like a thing floating out on a frail but / perfect twig-end.' How do we respond to a poet who is certain about the Great Barrier Reef but evasive about what stands before her eyes? .... Counting the swans, observing them closely, is for Yeats a way of reinhabiting ordinary life, as it is for Graham. Except that Graham is suspicious of the work of precision: to her, it feels like 'ownership', as if to name the world certainly were to lock it down, close off possibility, get it wrong. This suspicion is commendable philosophically and politically--especially if one's subject is the end of the world; nobody wants to be Chicken Little. But it's poetically problematic, since poems thrive on precision, and with a skilled poet like Graham, the avoidance of precision should not be anything but precise--a conscious choice to appear confused and incomplete. Why would a poet feign the inability to find the exact word for the thing at the end of a branch? Are a poet's errors of perception comparable to the mistakes that raised the temperature of the Gulf Stream, forcing a plum tree in Normandy to blossom out of season?

[poem] Summer Solstice (2007) from Seachange

The Real Siegfried Sassoon

Regeneration (1991) by Pat Barker is the first in the trilogy of novels on the First World War. The excerpt below narrates the first meeting of poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. The stuttering Owen asks the older, established poet to sign five copies of Sassoon's book:

Owen, feeding the names, would have given anything to say one sentence without stammering. No hope of that--he was far too nervous. Everything about Sassoon intimidated him. His status as a published poet, his height, his good looks, the clipped aristocratic voice, sometimes quick, sometimes halting, but always cold, the bored expression, the way he had of not looking at you when you spoke--shyness, perhaps but it seemed like arrogance. Above all, his reputation for courage. owen had his owen reasons for being sensitive about that. Sassoon reached the last book. Owen felt the meeting begin to slip away from him. Rather desperately, he said, 'I l-liked "The D-Death B-Bed" b-best.' And suddenly he relaxed. It doesn't matter what this Sassoon thought about him, since the real Sassoon was in the poems.

The Death-Bed from The Old Huntsman and Other Poems (1918):

He drowsed and was aware of silence heaped
Round him, unshaken as the steadfast walls;
Aqueous like floating rays of amber light,
Soaring and quivering in the wings of sleep.
Silence and safety; and his mortal shore
Lipped by the inward, moonless waves of death.

Someone was holding water to his mouth.
He swallowed, unresisting; moaned and dropped
Through crimson gloom to darkness; and forgot
The opiate throb and ache that was his wound.
Water--calm, sliding green above the weir.
Water--a sky-lit alley for his boat,
Bird-voiced, and bordered with reflected flowers
And shaken hues of summer; drifting down,
He dipped contented oars, and sighed, and slept.

Night, with a gust of wind, was in the ward,
Blowing the curtain to a glimmering curve.
Night. He was blind; he could not see the stars
Glinting among the wraiths of wandering cloud;
Queer blots of colour, purple, scarlet, green,
Flickered and faded in his drowning eyes.

Rain--he could hear it rustling through the dark;
Fragrance and passionless music woven as one;
Warm rain on drooping roses; pattering showers
That soak the woods; not the harsh rain that sweeps
Behind the thunder, but a trickling peace,
Gently and slowly washing life away.

He stirred, shifting his body; then the pain
Leapt like a prowling beast, and gripped and tore
His groping dreams with grinding claws and fangs.
But someone was beside him; soon he lay
Shuddering because that evil thing had passed.
And death, who'd stepped toward him, paused and stared.

Light many lamps and gather round his bed.
Lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live.
Speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet.
He's young; he hated War; how should he die
When cruel old campaigners win safe through?

But death replied: 'I choose him.' So he went,
And there was silence in the summer night;
Silence and safety; and the veils of sleep.
Then, far away, the thudding of the guns.

More from the Siegfried Sassoon collection at Bartleby.

Wilfred Owen in Edinburgh

[old] Wilfred Owen: A New Biography (2002) by Dominic Hibberd.

[Wilfred Owen] was almost ready to begin his annus mirabilis. Identifying himself with other people was not only an ergotherapeutic discipline but also what poets had to do. Keats had said that a poet should be 'continually informing and filling some other body', and Shelley had argued that it was through exercise of the poetic imagination that people could learn morality and love, putting themselves 'in the place of another and of many others', making the pains and pleasures of humanity their own. Wilfred wrote a little poem, 'Six O'Clock in Princes Street', imagining how he could join the happy crowds in town.... But his old ambition to be a meteor-poet, flying above the ordinary, meant he had to follow his own course, not keeping step with the crowd but following 'gleams unsafe, untrue', 'tiring after beauty through star-crowds'.

Six O'Clock in Princes Street from The Collected Poems (1963):

In twos and threes, they have not far to roam,
       Crowds that thread eastward, gay of eyes;
Those seek no further than their quiet home,
       Wives, walking westward, slow and wise.

Neither should I go fooling over clouds,
       Following gleams unsafe, untrue,
And tiring after beauty through star-crowds,
       Dared I go side by side with you;

Or be you in the gutter where you stand,
       Pale rain-flawed phantom of the place,
With news of all the nations in your hand,
       And all their sorrows in your face.

More from The Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive.

Michael Hofmann's Bricks and Blank Spaces

[review] Selected Poems by Michael Hofmann: ...prove[s] that he is a precise poet of desolations and furies, says George Szirtes.

[old interview] Where is our home key, anyway? (1999): Before I discovered blank space, or had any use for it. Other people’s poems were like swans carved out of butter, or something. My things looked dense, uncompromising, undifferentiated. The 'brick' was to suggest utility, interchangeability, compactness, aggressiveness even. I began by despising most poetry for being archaic and mindless and ornamental and unnecessary. Of course, a lot of it still is.

'Body Heat' originally from Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983):

This evening belongs to a warmer day--
separated clouds, birds, bits of green...
We wake late, naked, stuck to each other:
the greenhouse effect of windows and bedclothes.

Fifty years late, you finish Love on the Dole.
--Who knows, perhaps it can really be done?
The Boots hair-setting gel no longer works;
your pecker is down. The underdog's leather jacket

is here to stay, the stubborn lower lip
of the disconsolate punk...The poor hedgehogs,
they must help each other to pull off the leaves
that covered them while they were hibernating.

Manila Envelope

Manila Envelope (1989) by James Fenton is a limited edition collection printed in the Philippines. It has thirteen poems, ending with the Tagalog "Maski Papaano" above. Fenton explains: When I lived in Manila, I knew several aspiring poets who felt some frustration at the lack of any outlets for their work. I suggested self-publishing as the answer. This is what I had done over the years with John Fuller and with my brother. Poetry publishing is anyway a small-scale operation. In Manila, where the situation was ideal for the small press, such ventures were not well known.

[audio] 'The Milkfish Gatherers' cleverly translates two naughty Tagalog names of fish ('tampal-puki' and 'tarugo') into English [detail pointed out by J Neil C Garcia]:

Rummagers of inlets, scourers of the deep,
Dynamite men, their bottles crammed with wicks,
They named the sea's inhabitants with style--
The Slapped Vagina Fish, the Horse's Dick.

Polillo 'mets' means it is far away--
The smoking island plumed from slash and burn.
And from its shore, busy with hermit crabs,
Look to Luzon. Infanta melts in turn.

The collection begins with Blood and Lead:

Listen to what they did.
Don't listen to what they said.
What was written in blood
Has been set up in lead.

Lead tears the heart.
Lead tears the brain.
What was written in blood
Has been set up again.

The heart is a drum.
The drum has a snare.
The snare is in the blood.
The blood is in the air.

Listen to what they did.
Listen to what's to come.
Listen to the blood.
Listen to the drum.

James Fenton on Wilfred Owen

'Wilfred Owen's Juvenilia' by James Fenton (The Strength of Poetry, 2001):

...a complicated set of forces combined to release [Owen] from the spirit of his juvenilia. When reasoning about our creativity, we cannot assume that causality is going to behave in thew ay causality normally behaves. There must be such a thing as causality, we assume; but we cannot expect to understand its workings. In the writing of poetry we may say that the thing we predict will not happen. If we can predict it, it is not poetry. We have to surprise ourselves. We have to outpace our colder calculations.

To-- from The Collected Poems (1963):

Three rompers run together hand in hand.
The middle boy stops short, the others hurtle:
What bumps, what shrieks, what laughter turning turtle.
Love, racing between us two, has planned
A sudden mischief: shortly he will stand
And we shall shock. We cannot help but fall;
What matter? Why, it will not hurt at all,
Our youth is supple, and the world is sand.

Better our lips should bruise our eyes, than He,
Rude Love, outrun our breath; you pant, and I,
I cannot run much farther; mind that we
Both laugh with love; and having tumbled, try
To go forever children, hand in hand.
The sea is rising... and the world is sand.

More from The Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive.

Douglas Dunn on Creative Writing Programmes

[pdf] Douglas Dunn interview (The Dark Horse, 1999) by Gerry Cambridge:

DD: A lot of reviewing in the literary magazines as opposed to the newspapers, strikes me as being done by post-graduates who are actually printing a chunk of a thesis. By and large I think Universities are a good thing, because I work in one; but their influence on literature is not always good. GC: Why? DD: It academises it. Full stop. Nothing more to say, really. So a writer who works in a university has to protect him or herself. Kathleen Jamie and John Burnside have just been appointed to the School of English in St Andrews, to teach creative writing. I’ll have to look after them. Make sure they don’t get into bad habits. GC: Was St Andrews the first University in Scotland to institute a degree in creative writing? DD: Yes. It’s a one year post-graduate course; it started in 1993. GC: In America creative writing courses are ubiquitous. Some critical opinion over there feels that’s a negative thing. If there were many more creative writing courses in Scottish Universities would it be healthy? DD: Perhaps not. But I don’t think every University needs to have one; there isn’t the market. We get by because we attract quite a lot of Americans who are disenchanted with what’s on offer in the USA. And they want to come and study at St Andrews, in a different culture. And it’s not sitting around talking about your feelings. If they do the poetry course with me then they have to learn versification, as well as study poetry of the past; one of the essays they have to write is on the history of Blank Verse, in Blank Verse. Or they could do a history of the rhyming couplet in rhyming couplets. GC: And how long does this history have to be? DD: At least 150 lines. GC: You mentioned earlier that some of these students can’t study Robert Frost at an American University. That seems an extraordinary situation. DD: Absolutely. If it continues, American culture, never mind American poetry, will go down the drain.

A Removal from Terry Street from Terry Street (1969):

On a squeaking cart, they push the usual stuff,
A mattress, bed ends, cups, carpets, chairs,
Four paperback westerns. Two whistling youths
In surplus U.S. Army battle-jackets
Remove their sister’s goods. Her husband
Follows, carrying on his shoulders the son
Whose mischief we are glad to see removed,
And pushing, of all things, a lawnmower.
There is no grass in Terry Street. The worms
Come up cracks in concrete yards in moonlight.
That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass.

More on Arlindo Correia with Portugese translations (2004).