Sherry Chandler

A week ago, Helen Losse of Windows Toward the World tagged me with a poetry quotation meme:

“Give us at least 10 quotations pertaining to poetry - from 10 different writers &/or poets which best coincide with your philosophy vis a vis ars poetica. They can be posthumous or otherwise. The order is not important - unless it is to you.”

I hedged and said I’d have to think about it because I think slow. And so I do, especially when asked to choose things. I’m not good with restaurant menus or shopping in big warehouse stores or picking favorite colors. If some one walks into a room and says “Who’s your favorite poet?” I just can’t answer.

But a week has passed and I guess it’s time to put up or shut up. So here are some quotations from poets that I consider part of my ars poetica. I don’t consider the list definitive in any way:

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
—Robert Frost

***

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
—W. H. Auden, Part II of “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”

***

the way a fox slips into one side
of your headlights and carrying his tail
(like a pen running out of ink) slips
out the other —
—James Baker Hall, the entirety of “Ars Poetica”

***

Hotspur: Marry,
And I am glad of it with all my heart!
I had rather be a kitten and cry mew
Than one of these same metre ballad-mongers–
I had rather hear a brazen canstick turned,
Or a dry wheel grate on the axle-tree,
And that would set my teeth on edge,
Nothing so much as mincing poetry–
— from Henry IV Part 1, Act 3, Scene 1, lines 119-132

***

Outside my window I see lettered angus
on the hillside composing pastorals,
cantos to clover, a haiku whose theme
this July morning is sweet surrender
to the dark cove of an encompasssing oak,
a deep draught of rainwater in a silver tank…
—Richard Taylor, from “Cattle Song,” built on the epigraph Nathan Banks, a 22 year old student…painted single words on the flanks of about 60 cows…then let them wander around to see if they could compose poetry.

***

I would not paint—a picture—
I’d rather be the One
It’s bright impossibility
To dwell—delicious—on—
And wonder how the fingers feel
Whose rare—celestial—stir
Provokes so sweet a Torment—
Such sumptuous—Despair—

…

Nor would I be a Poet—
It’s finer—own the Ear—
Enamored—impotent—content—
The License to revere,
A luxury so awful
What would the Dower be,
Had I the Art to stun
myself
With Bolts of Melody!
—Emily Dickinson, #505

***

I alone have lived to tell this
little story, and now I approach
the dark to which they’ve gone.
A last hope, that lamp
still shines, like silver,
gold, a wondrous light
which won’t yet yield its name.
—Jane Gentry, from “The Reading Lamp”

***

Most of us poets, o father and sons who are worthy of that father, deceive ourselves by an illusion of correct procedure. I work at achieving brevity; instead I become obscure. Striving for smoothness, vigor and spirit escape me. One poet, promising the sublime, delivers pomposity. Another creeps along the ground, overly cautious and too much frightened of the gale. Whoever wishes to vary a single subject in some strange and wonderful way, paints a dolphin into a forest and a boar onto the high seas. The avoidance of blame leads to error if there is an absence of art.
—Horace, Ars Poetica, trans Leon Gordon

***

Maybe all of The Last Poem by Pier Giorgio Di Cicco.

***

99. Those who would excerpt or edit miss the point.
—Ron Silliman, from The Chinese Notebook

I suggest you follow this meme to these blogs: Windows Toward the World, Songs to a Midnight Sky, sam of ten thousand things, Collin Kelley . . . Modern Confessional, Chanticleer, and Lutheran Surrealism.

I would like to hear from the poets who comment here but don’t blog themselves: Charlie H & Charlie W, Rosalie, and Deanne. What is your ars poetica, dear readers?

Among blogging poets, I tag Harry Rutherford, Billy Jones, and Alan Bender. And anybody else who’d like to play.

Do it if you want. If you don’t, I’m okay with that.