BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: POETS & POETRY

  ZEN AND THE ART OF READING POETRY

The sadness that tells me I shall be sad,
The happiness that tells me I shall be sad.

LJP
**
ON A POEM WAITING TO BE WRITTEN

“ I keep thinking of this poem that should contain 
the line ‘his father built him a house with beams 
of human ribs.’ But I can’t get beyond the imagery 
of that line.”

Alice Walker in  Gathering Blossoms Under Fire:  
The Journals of Alice Walker, edited by Valerie Boyd
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022
**

PHILIP LARKIN

Philip Larkin,
Pulling into a parkin
g garage near Leeds, scraped his car’s bonnet.
(Perhaps this wd sound better as an Italian sonnet?)

**
POETIC RECOGNITION SCENES
“The history of poetry contains many accounts of what
 might be called poetic recognition scenes, meetings 
where the poet comes face to face with something or 
someone in the outer world recognized as vital to 
the poet’s inner creative life, and accounts of 
these meetings represent some of the highest 
achievements in the art.”

Seamus Heaney. “ ‘Apt Admonishment’ : Wordsworth 
as an Example” in The Hudson Review (Spring, 2008)

Examples mentioned by Heaney: Dante’s meeting with 
Vergil in The Inferno, T.S. Eliot encounter with ghost
of Yeats in “Little Gidding” and William Wordsworth’s
 encounter with a leech gatherer in “Resolution and
Independence.”

**
WHAT DOES POETRY MAKE HAPPEN?

"For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its saying where executives
Would never want to tamper..."

from 'IN MEMORY OF W.B.YEATS 'by W.H. Auden

“When Auden said his poetry didn’t save a single Jew
from the gas chambers, he was dead right.”
                  
            Tom Stoppard in 1973
**

EZRA POUND

Ezra Pound
On his keyboard found
The symbol #
& when he learned what it meant, he cursed %^&&#.

**


ON CONDENSED METAPHORS

“Metaphor and Simile are fundamental to civilized speech: 
but they have one serious disadvantage, the moment you 
say one thing is ‘like’ another , you remind the reader 
that the two things are, after all, different; and there 
may be an effect of dilution and long-windedness which is inimical to poetry. The poet, therefore, condenses his 
metaphor. Hart Crane in Voyages III, referring to the 
rhythm of the motion of a boat through a thickly 
clustered archipelago, speaks of ‘adagios of islands’. Similarly, in Faustus and Helen III the speed and altitude 
of an aeroplane are suggested by the idea of ‘nimble blue plateaus’…”

Michael Roberts. The Faber Book of Modern Verse
(London: Faber and Faber, 1965)
**

EDMUND SPENSER

Edmund Spenser
Was not much of a fencer. Hence, sir,
He wd with pen & ink prefer to toil,
Dispensing with epee, saber & foil.

**
THE AWAKENING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

“In closing I want to tell you about a dream I had
last summer. I dreamed I was asked to read my 
poetry at a mass woman’s meeting, but when I began 
to read what came out were the lyrics of a blues 
song. I share this dream with you because it seemed 
to me to say something about the problems and the 
future of the woman writer, and probably of women 
in general. The awakening of consciousness is not
 like the crossing of a frontier – one step and 
you are in another country.”

Adrienne Rich. “ When We Dead Awaken: Writing as
Re-Vision” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected
Prose 1966-1978  (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979)

**

from CELEBRATIONS & BEWILDERMENTS

“They were learning to draw,” the dormouse went on, 
yawning and rubbing its eyes, for it was getting 
very sleepy; “...and they drew all manner of 
things—everything that begins with an M—”
“Why with an M?” said Alice. “Why not?” 
said the March Hare.

My muse makes merry, Much music
Made mirthful, Moon-mad.
More, more, more, More mischief. My mien
Mirrors
My moods,
My mind,
My manners,
Metered motion,
My muse makes melody.
Metaphor mends me, 
My mad medley, 
Man-matrixed. 
Matter mold me,
Mouth mysteries,
Mute miracles.
 Mountebank, mourn me, 
My measured masque. 
My muse moves me.
My metaphor mends me.

Louis Phillips