Sherry Chandler » Quotation Meme
Quotation Meme
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.
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7 Comments
1. Helen Losse replies at 2nd June 2007, 11:07 am :
I think it’s interesting that some people chose excerpts from poems, and some chose quotes about poems (maybe not even from poets). Anyway a lot of good material to think about . I’d like to add one more site: Mountains and Memories. WW had some good quotes about poetry. See http://mountainsandmemories.blogspot.com/2007/05/what-is-poetry.html
2. sherry replies at 2nd June 2007, 11:35 am :
Thanks, Helen, for a thought-provoking exercise and a great link.
I personally find quotes about poetry too limited, somehow, though there are some very good ones. They get bits and pieces but not the thing itself. The Frost one is the only one I actually try to live by.
But I don’t consider myself an authority by any manner of means.
3. Harry replies at 3rd June 2007, 9:55 am :
Hmm, this might require some thought.
4. Billy The Blogging Poet replies at 3rd June 2007, 3:34 pm :
Well this should be fun!
5. Charles W. replies at 5th June 2007, 9:26 am :
Profundity has its place in my Ars Poetica, but so does wit and humor. I tend to believe that much poetry today is written just for poetry’s sake and it’s easily perceived when a writer struggles to give his work more depth than it carries on its own. Also, if there ever was a group who took themselves too seriously, I think that it would have to be we poets. We need to lighten up, I think.
I cannot, and do not want to say, what poetry should look like, sound like, or mean to someone else. Isn’t it accepted, that poetry’s ability to lend itself to individual interpretation is one of it’s most interesting features? “What does it mean to you?” Wasn’t it Frost who gave that answer when asked what a certain passage meant? I think a good poem could, and probably should have as many interpretations as it has readers.
I can’t give an intelligent reason for why I like a certain work, except that it does something to me. I have never questioned it, and believe it to be a natural reaction unique to myself alone.
Some of my best remembered quotes actually came from contemporaries who might not have yet become famous. If some line or stanza has special meaning to me, I will remember it without trying. That is how I know I truly like something.
Ars Poetica
Here are a few poems and passages from poems that have special meaning to me. I included two from Ferlinghetti because they are just so good.
Peggy Wilburn—NINETY-NINE MILES TO THE OHIO
Sometimes I like to think my words are worth as much as the shape of branches,
bending toward sun.
That there is value, real as the work of planting, in them–
Lawrence Ferlinghetti—AWAY ABOVE A HARBORFUL
Away above a harborful
of caulkless houses
among the charley noble chimneypots
of a rooftop rigged with clotheslines
a woman pastes up sails
upon the wind
hanging out her morning sheets
with wooden pins
O lovely mammal
her nearly naked breasts
throw taut shadows
when she stretches up
to hang at last the last of her
so white washed sins
but it is wetly amorous
and winds itself about her
clinging to her skin
So caught with arms
upraised
she tosses back her head
in voiceless laughter
and in choiceless gesture then
shakes out gold hair
while in the reachless seascape spaces
between the blown white shrouds
stand out the bright steamers
to kingdom come
Lawrence Ferlinghetti—DON’T LET THAT HORSE
Don’t let that horse eat that violin
Cried Chagall’s mother
But he kept right on painting
And became famous
And kept on painting
The horse with violin in mouth
And when he finally finished it
He jumped up upon the horse
And rode away waving the violin
And then with a low bow gave it
To the first naked nude he ran across
And there were no strings attached
Robert Wilson—We cared too much for others ease.
Robert Frost—DEATH OF THE HIRED MAN
Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.
Ogden Nash—OLD MEN
People expect old men to die.
They do not really mourn old men.
Old men are different. People look
At them with eyes that wonder when.,,
People watch with unshocked eyes;
But the old men know when an old man dies.
R. Kipling—BALLAD OF THE EAST AND WEST
They have looked each other between the eyes,
And there they have found no fault.
They have taken the oath of the brother in blood
On leavened bread and salt.
They have taken the oath of the brother in blood
On fire and fresh-cut sod,
On the hilt and the haft of the Khyber knife
And the wondrous names of God.
Stephen Vincent Benet—THE MOUNTAIN WHIPPOORILL
Big Tom Sargent was the first in line;
He could fiddle all the bugs off a sweet-potato vine.
He could fiddle down a possum from a mile-high tree,
He could fiddle up a whale from the bottom of the sea.
This is my Ars(e) Poetica. Hope I haven’t shown too much of it.—charlie w
6. sherry replies at 5th June 2007, 3:50 pm :
Wonderful, Charlie W! Thank you.
7. sherry replies at 5th June 2007, 3:56 pm :
Go read Billy’s Top Ten, too. His choices are equally wonderful for totally different reasons. That’s why I’m loving this meme.
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