2006 E3H-ers:

Let's explore what poets say that poems are. My own definition, such as it is, can be found here. More accomplished poets have their say here.

Metapoetry: Poems About Poetry

Not Marble, Nor the Gilded Monuments

William Shakespeare (Sonnet LV)

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war will statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars’s his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room,
Even in eyes of all posterity
That wear this word out to the ending doom.
 So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
 You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.
 
(More sonnets) 

"Not Marble nor the Gilded Monuments"

Archibald Macleash

The praisers of women in their proud and beautiful poems,
Naming the grave mouth and the hair and they eyes,
Boasted those they loved should be forever remembered:
These were lies.

The words sound but the face in the Istrian sun is forgotten.
The poet speaks but to her dead ears no more.
The sleek throat is gone-and the breast that was troubled to listen:
Shadow from door.

Therefore I will not praise your knees nor your fine walking
Telling you men shall remember your name as long
As lips move or breath is spent or the iron of English
Rings from a tongue.

I shall say you were young, and your arms straight, and your mouth scarlet:
I shall say you will die and none will remember you:
Your arms change, and none remember the swish of your garments,
Nor the click of your shoe.

Not with my hand's strength, not with the difficult labor
Springing the obstinate words to the bones of your breast
And the stubborn line to your young stride and the breath to your breathing
And the beat to your haste
Shall I prevail on the hearts of unborn men to remember.

(What is a dead girl but a shadowy ghost
Or a dead man's voice but a distant and vain affirmation
Like dream words most)

Therefore I will not speak of the undying glory of women.
I will say you were young and straight and your skin fair
And you stood in the door and the sun was a shadow of leaves on your shoulders
And a leaf on your hair-

I will not speak of the famous beauty of dead women:
I will say the shape of a leaf lay once on your hair.
Till the world ends and the eyes are out and the mouths broken
Look! It is there!

MacLeish’s Bio

Ars Poetica

Archibald MacLeish

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.

Poetry

Marianne Moore

 
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.
 
The Juggler

Richard Wilbur

A ball will bounce, but less and less. It's not
A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience.
Falling is what it loves, and the earth falls
So in our hearts from brilliance,
Settles and is forgot.
It takes a sky-blue juggler with five red balls

To shake our gravity up. Whee, in the air
The balls roll round, wheel on his wheeling hands,
Learning the ways of lightness, alter to spheres
Grazing his finger ends,
Cling to their courses there,
Swinging a small heaven about his ears.

But a heaven is easier made of nothing at all
Than the earth regained, and still and sole within
The spin of worlds, with a gesture sure and noble
He reels that heaven in,
Landing it ball by ball,
And trades it all for a broom, a plate, a table.

Oh, on his toe the table is turning, the broom's
Balancing up on his nose, and the plate whirls
On the tip of the broom! Damn, what a show, we cry:
The boys stamp, and the girls
Shriek, and the drum booms
And all comes down, and he bows and says good-bye.

If the juggler is tired now, if the broom stands
In the dust again, if the table starts to drop
Through the daily dark again, and though the plate
Lies flat on the tabel top,
For him we batter our hands
Who has won for once over the world's weight.

Of Modern Poetry

Wallace Stevens

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what 
Was in the script.
 Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
 
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet 
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage, 
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging 
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
 It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

"Introduction to Poetry"

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with a rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

For Poets
by Al Young

Stay beautiful
but don't stay down underground too long
Dont turn into a mole
or a worm
or a root
or a stone

Come on out into the sunlight
Breathe in trees
Knock out mountains
Commune with snakes
& be the very hero of birds

Don't forget to poke your head up
& blink
Think
Walk all around
Swim upstream

Dont forget to fly

Oatmeal
Galway Kinnell

I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
Its consistency is such that is better for your mental health if somebody eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have breakfast with.
Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary companion.
Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal porridge, as he called it with John Keats.
Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him:
due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime, and unsual willingness to disintigrate, oatmeal should not be eaten alone.
He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat it with an imaginary companion, and that he himself had enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John Milton.
Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as wholesome as Keats claims, still, you can learn something from it.
Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the "Ode to a Nightingale."
He had a heck of a time finishing it those were his words "Oi 'ad a 'eck of a toime," he said, more or less, speaking through his porridge.
He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his pocket,
but when he got home he couldn't figure out the order of the stanzas, and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they made some sense of them, but he isn't sure to this day if they got it right.
An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket through a hole in his pocket.
He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas, and the way here and there a line will go into the configuration of a Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up and peer about, and then lay \ itself down slightly off the mark, causing the poem to move forward with a reckless, shining wobble.
He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some stanzas of his own, but only made matters worse.
I would not have known any of this but for my reluctance to eat oatmeal alone.
When breakfast was over, John recited "To Autumn."
He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.
He didn't offer the story of writing "To Autumn," I doubt if there is much of one.
But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field go thim started on it, and two of the lines, "For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cells" and "Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours," came to him while eating oatmeal alone.
I can see him drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering furrows, muttering.
Maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters.
For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch.
I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and simultaneaously gummy and crumbly, and therefore I'm going to invite Patrick Kavanagh to join me.

Examination: The Function of Art

Paul Roche

“Do you write poems to please

Or to tell the truth?” she asked.

“To tell the truth,” I said.

“In which I lie. Necessarily.

To make a wound

Differently (from science or knowledge).”

“Because of the lie?” she asked.

“Yes, and difficult.

I lie for art. Creating

something new.”…”A box,

Or house?” she said. “Yes new

But not a house exactly.

Exactly, art must speak.”

“Like what?” she said.

“Like what it’s like to be a human being.”

“I thought art was beautiful,” she said.

“Of course—by how it tells the truth:

Necessarily—by lying.”

“The truth’s not nice,” she said:

“Sometimes…Murder, incest, suicide.”

“Yes, sometimes Oedipus,” I said,

“But also dreams are real

Dreams. The lie

Illuminates to wound;

The wound, to please.

To please is art. To tease

Out essences…” “So, more

Than craft?” she said.

“Oh much, but craftly, subtle.

Even subtile. Difficult.

Too much lying,” I said,

“Makes only sunsets.

Too much truth, the dead

Grammar of a mirror.

There is no way to weight

The leap of an eye.

It’s not the seeing but the vision.

Not the lasting but the moment.

Not the murder but the passion.

Something like a lie. Yes.

Pretence. Beautifully. To be…

The truth.”

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