Posts Tagged poems about poetry

In honor of National Poetry Month, MontanaWriter is featuring poems about poets, poetry, and writing poetry. For more poems about poetry, click here.

For April we have featured poems by Wendell Berry, Carl Sandburg, Billy Collins, James Wright, Archibald MacLeish, and a poem by W.H. Auden about W.B. Yeats. It is only fitting for National Poetry Month that we include at least one  poem by Yeats himself… the greatest poet of the 20th Century and one of the a handful of poets that can be considered truly essential.

“Under Ben Bulben” is, of course, one of Yeats’ most famous poems.  It is also the perfect poem for National Poetry Month because its subject is ultimately poetry and poets, a subject Yeats knew more about than any man since… Shelley?

As I have said often here at MontanaWriter, poetry should be read aloud. This is particularly true of Yeats. It is only when you read him aloud that you can fully appreciate his genius.

This poem was one of the last poems Yeats wrote. In his 20s, he was already one of the best poets in the world… yet he only got better. Of what other artist can that be said? More than 50 years of continual artistic growth stopped only by his death. Remarkable!

Enjoy!

Under Ben Bulben
I
Swear by what the sages spoke
Round the Mareotic Lake
That the Witch of Atlas knew,
Spoke and set the cocks a-crow.

Swear by those horsemen, by those women
Complexion and form prove superhuman,
That pale, long-visaged company
That air in immortality
Completeness of their passions won;
Now they ride the wintry dawn
Where Ben Bulben sets the scene.

Here’s the gist of what they mean.

II
Many times man lives and dies
Between his two eternities,
That of race and that of soul,
And ancient Ireland knew it all.
Whether man die in his bed
Or the rifle knocks him dead,
A brief parting from those dear
Is the worst man has to fear.
Though grave-digger’s toil is long,
Sharp their spades, their muscles strong,
They but thrust their buried men
Back in the human mind again.

III
You that Mitchel’s prayer have heard,
“Send war in our time, O Lord!”
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind,
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace.
Even the wisest man grows tense
With some sort of violence
Before he can accomplish fate,
Know his work or choose his mate.

IV
Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did,
Bring the soul of man to God,
Make him fill the cradles right.

Measurement began our might:
Forms a stark Egyptian thought,
Forms that gentler Phidias wrought,
Michael Angelo left a proof
On the Sistine Chapel roof,
Where but half-awakened Adam
Can disturb globe-trotting Madam
Till her bowels are in heat,
Proof that there’s a purpose set
Before the secret working mind:
Profane perfection of mankind.

Quattrocento put in paint
On backgrounds for a God or Saint
Gardens where a soul’s at ease;
Where everything that meets the eye,
Flowers and grass and cloudless sky,
Resemble forms that are or seem
When sleepers wake and yet still dream,
And when it’s vanished still declare,
With only bed and bedstead there,
That heavens had opened.

Gyres run on;
When that greater dream had gone
Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude,
Prepared a rest for the people of God,
Palmer’s phrase, but after that
Confusion fell upon our thought.

V
Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds.
Sing the peasantry, and then
Hard-riding country gentlemen,
The holiness of monks, and after
Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter;
Sing the lords and ladies gay
That were beaten into clay
Through seven heroic centuries;
Cast your mind on other days
That we in coming days may be
Still the indomitable Irishry.

VI
Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:

Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did,
Bring the soul of man to God…

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Irish poets, learn your trade,
Sing whatever is well made,
Scorn the sort now growing up
All out of shape from toe to top,
Their unremembering hearts and heads
Base-born products of base beds…

In this poem there are so many fine lines that catch your ear and eye… such as the famous final stanza, of course. But for National Poetry Month, these lines about the responsibilities of the poet stand out. Read out loud you notice what Yeats does with alliterative word-pairing and echoing, “toe to top,” “heart and heads,” and finally “base-born products of base beds.”

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In honor of National Poetry Month, MontanaWriter is featuring poems about poets, poetry, and writing poetry. For more poems about poetry, click here.

Carl Sandburg's birthplace (copyright @m.a.h. hinton)

At the half-way point of National Poetry Month, moisture has finally come to the North Country. The much drier than normal winter and early spring have given way to the kind of April showers we so desperately need. Egrets have returned to the wetlands near my house and every day the feeders are busy with gold finches and black-capped chickadees. In a word, it is spring.

In my early 20s, I spent this time of year in Chicago. It was a perfect life. Fall, winter, and spring in the city of broad shoulders and the rest of the year in the mountains. What that meant was that I experienced spring twice… as well as fall, for spring comes late to the high altitudes and autumn comes early.

No poet, of course, is more associated with Chicago than Sandburg. And there are few poets I enjoy reading these days as much as Sandburg either.

On a wet, spring morning, Sandburg seems like the perfect poet.

Enjoy!

Chicago Poet
I saluted a nobody.
I saw him in a looking-glass.
He smiled—so did I.
He crumpled the skin on his forehead,
frowning—so did I.
Everything I did he did.
I said, “Hello, I know you.”
And I was a liar to say so.

Ah, this looking-glass man!
Liar, fool, dreamer, play-actor,
Soldier, dusty drinker of dust—
Ah! he will go with me
Down the dark stairway
When nobody else is looking,
When everybody else is gone.

He locks his elbow in mine,
I lose all—but not him.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

 Ah, this looking-glass man!
Liar, fool, dreamer, play-actor,
Soldier, dusty drinker of dust—

The idea of masks is as old as poetry itself. The “faces” we wear for others, even for ourselves, are many… the dramatis personae of our selves is long.  Poets just think and speak about these masks in a more direct and calculating fashion. It is through poetic persona that a poet speaks. Even the most apparently autobiographical poem needs to be read with this concept of masks always in the background. Sandburg knew the reality of this as well as any poet does.

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In honor of National Poetry Month, MontanaWriter is featuring poems about poets, poetry, and writing poetry. For more poems about poetry, click here.

Here in the North Country, the juncoes have moved north and red-winged blackbirds are singing again in the cattails. A warmer than normal spring has become suddenly cool. Frost warnings have apple farmers scrambling and city folk turning their furnaces back on again. But since the sun is out and the days are growing longer, it is hard to complain.

James Wright spent a great deal of time in the North Country. He knew the want of hard-winters as well as the bountiful beauty of easy springs: physically, spiritually, and emotionally. (Wright, like so many poets – all poets – suffered from depression.) Many of his best poems are about the beauty of nature… at least, many that I like best.

Wright was an innovator in every possible way. One of the ways he pushed at the edges of things was in the way he titled his poems. The official title of today’s poems is “Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me.” Even if the poem were not so good, I would love it for the title alone

“Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry…” comes from Wright’s 1963 volume of poetry entitled, The Branch Will Not Break. It seems like the perfect poem for a spring day.

Enjoy!

Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry,
I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture
and Invite the Insects to Join Me

Relieved, I let the book fall behind a stone.
I climb a slight rise of grass.
I do not want to disturb the ants
Who are walking single file up the fence post,
Carrying small white petals,
Casting shadows so frail that I can see through them.
I close my eyes for a moment and listen.
The old grasshoppers
Are tired, they leap heavily now,
Their thighs are burdened.
I want to hear them, they have clear sounds to make.
Then lovely, far off, a dark cricket begins
In the maple trees.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

 I do not want to disturb the ants
Who are walking single file up the fence post,
Carrying small white petals,
Casting shadows so frail that I can see through them.

Wright has written some of the most luminous lines I know. This is one of those lines. So is the final line of the poem. These luminous lines… unlike the lines in the book of bad poetry that occasioned this poem… are like “small white petals” casting “shadows so frail” that we “can see through them.”  They are what poetry is supposed to be.

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In honor of National Poetry Month, MontanaWriter is featuring poems about poets, poetry, and writing poetry. For more poems about poetry, click here.

Poets end up writing a lot about poetry and poems because in the end they write about the things they know best and feel most passionately about. For the poet, naturally, there is nothing to feel more passionate about than poetry.

“Ars Poetica” is, of course, a staple of English Literature classrooms. It is often used to springboard a discussion about the purpose of poetry in specific and art in general. There is the usual nod to the irony of discussing the “meaning” of a poem about poetry having no meaning, but it is only that: a nod. The assumption in academia remains that no one could seriously believe such an assertion… at least no one who is not a poet.

On a cool April morning, MacLeish seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

Ars Poetica

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.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

MacLeish repeats this line twice in the stanza-section. He also repeats the word moon in each line of the same stanza. Only the word poem occurs more times in the poem – six times for “poem” to  four times for “moon.” Repetition in poetry is for tone, sound, and emphasis. He is, of course, using it for all three purposes.

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In honor of National Poetry Month, MontanaWriter is featuring poems about poets, poetry, and writing poetry. For more poems about poetry, click here.

Wendell Berry is a writer and an activist. He has written novels, short-stories, essays and books of non-fiction on subjects as varied as farming, economics, politics, and Christianity. Yet in the end, he is a lyric poet.

I have certainly not read all of his prose work, but enough to suggest that it is this lyrical/poetical nature of his that informs his thinking about and interests in subjects like peace and justice, Christian spirituality, and living close to the land.

Berry is ultimately a poet-farmer, a poet-economist, a poet-activist, a poet-philosopher, and a poet-theologian. In short, he is the kind of writer and thinker the world has too few of.

On a beautiful Easter Saturday, a Wendell Berry poem seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

How to Be a Poet

     Source: Poetry (January 2001).

I like a number of lines in this poem. Yet in the end the poem builds to this long, final line. When I first read this poem I found the last stanza clumsy. Yet I read it again out-loud and came to like it very much. Over time I have come to love it. Silence as holy. Poetry as prayer. The poet as mystic.

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 In honor of National Poetry Month, MontanaWriter is featuring poems about poets, poetry, and writing poetry. For more poems about poetry, click here.

Poetry is “taught” in most of our schools completely wrong. The emphasis is on discovering the “hidden meanings” of a poem. The result is that while most children love Dr. Seuss and rhymes most people reach adulthood believing that they do not like poetry at all. “I don’t understand it,” is the usual response when asked.

In “Introduction to Poetry,” Billy Collins writes about this process as well as I have ever seen it written.  ”Introduction to Poetry” comes from Collins’ first volume of poems The Apple that Astonished Paris. On a beautiful, National-Poetry-Month morning it seems like the perfect poem.

Enjoy!

Introduction to Poetry
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 rope
and torture a confession out of it.

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

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

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

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

Most adults who say they “do not understand poetry” say that only because they had to sit in too many classrooms listening to poems being analyzed. Sadly, under-grad English majors are some of those who most often make the claim that they really don’t like poetry as much as fiction because they “do not understand” it.

If you are an English teacher, print this poem out and put it up somewhere in your classroom where you will always see it. And every time you are about to talk about poetry and/or a particular poem look at it… and remember: a poem is to be enjoyed. Not analyzed. Not dissected or un-packed. Enjoyed!

The only legitimate questions about a poem should be questions like:

• What are your favorite images/words/lines? Why?
• What kind of feelings and emotions came to you while reading the poem?
• What lines sound best when read out-loud?
• Did you enjoy the poem? Why or why not?
• Pick two lines and memorize them for tomorrow

That is enough for poetry. Enough to make poetry relevant and enjoyable and something to look forward to. Enough to make English majors be able to say, “I enjoy poetry!”

____

Marianne Moore

If you approach Marianne Moore the same way as you approach most poets you will be quickly frustrated. Her poetry is more difficult, confounding, and requires more work than that of most poets, even other Modernists. She was a poetic experimenter, encyclopedist, and iconoclast.

One of the things that make her difficult on the surface is that she eschewed traditional poetic form and meter, believing that the true essence of poetry lay not in such outward “traditionalities” (to coin a phrase) but in a precise and luminous delight in language.

Her most famous poem is “Poetry.” Here she makes her case for the kind of poetry she is longing to read and write,… and the the kind of poets she is longing for. She is also making the case for why poetry, this most frivolous of things, really can and does matter.

Moore like many poets constantly re-wrote and redacted her poems, especially late in her life. When you find a poem by her you like, you may also find many, many versions of it. Her famous poem “Poetry” is no exception.

Poetry

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.

_____