poets

Poetry of spring

Springtime is a poet —
the blue sky its blank page
so vibrant green in rhyme
a different metre for every clime
birds chirping to keep the time
wildflowers yellow, red, purple divine
words dancing on tall blades of grasses
sparkling in the morning dews
no commas the flow keeps buzzing
vernal dashes & blossoming branches
on newly greening verdant trees
refrains whispering in each breeze
butterflies — floating apostrophes
ladybugs dot floral question marks
blissful bees stray stanza to stanza
seeds disperse from verse to verse
continuing a poem that’s never ended
and into summer’s colors is blended

Terri Guillemets

One boot off

“On the floor of your mind, then — is it not this that makes you a poet? — rhythm keeps up its perpetual beat. Sometimes it seems to die down to nothing; it lets you eat, sleep, talk like other people. Then it swells again and rises and attempts to sweep all the contents of your mind into one dominant dance. Tonight is such an occasion. Although you are alone, and have taken one boot off and are about to undo the other, you cannot go on with the process of undressing, but must instantly write at the bidding of the dance. You snatch pen and paper; you hardly trouble to hold the one or to straighten the other. And while you write, while the first stanzas of the dance are being fastened down, I will withdraw a little and look out of the window. A woman passes, then a man; a car glides to a stop and then — but there is no need to say what I see out of the window, nor indeed is there time, for I am suddenly recalled from my observations by a cry of rage or despair. Your page is crumpled in a ball; your pen sticks upright by the nib in the carpet… You are rasped, jarred, thoroughly out of temper. And if I am to guess the reason, it is, I should say, that the rhythm which was opening and shutting with a force that sent shocks of excitement from your head to your heels has encountered some hard and hostile object upon which it has smashed itself to pieces. Something has worked in which cannot be made into poetry; some foreign body, angular, sharp-edged, gritty, has refused to join the dance…

“The poet as I guess has strained himself to include an emotion that is not domesticated and acclimatized to poetry; the effort has thrown him off his balance; he rights himself… by a violent recourse to the poetical — he invokes the moon or the nightingale. Anyhow, the transition is sharp. The poem is cracked in the middle. Look, it comes apart in my hands:  here is reality on one side, here is beauty on the other; and instead of acquiring a whole object rounded and entire, I am left with broken parts in my hands…”

—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), letter to John Lehmann, 1931

The Poet, II

My body was once a beautiful house of marble,
Kissed to pale rose by the passionate heat of the sun,
Wherein through cunning channels flowed forever
Health-giving crimson blood in steady tides.

My eyes were then quick to see and to welcome beauty,
My lips smiled often with gratified desire,
My hands shook not, but were fit for caress or grapple,
My arms rose and my body moved in strength.

Then not a single line of any poem
Had my hands raped from my brain, but untouched and pure
They abode in the land of distant visions where no man
Heard my voice calling for them at eventide.

My blood lies in great black lakes now, sluggish and frozen,
Or fumes in like some boiling, stinging, poison brew
Till it suddenly stops in a lassitude unspoken,
Or bursts through my pores and covers me with red dew:

My eyes are bleared now and dull with sleepless midnights,
My lips are shrunken purses—their gold is spent,
My hands unsteadily clutch and paw and tremble,
My arms are as strings of macaroni bent.

And as for my chest, ’tis like a leaky air-box
Fixed to some cheap melodeon out of tune,
The bellows creak, the loose and brown keys rattle,
And the music that comes is like a dog’s sick moan.

But in my brain there seethes an adulterous hotchpotch
Of poems clean and disgusting, mad and sage;
And pain, like a dry fire, keeps them ever a-boiling
Till they splash over and blacken some wasted page.

Yes, I am a poet now to be mocked and applauded,
A turnspit that turns and must never taste the meat:
Behold how great I am, but I wait for a greater,
Even Death, who will silence the march of these crippled feet.

—John Gould Fletcher (1886–1950), “The Poet, II,” Fire and Wine, 1913

Silence in the poet

after a lifetime of doing almost nothing
but collecting words, now — here i am
finding that my life has become all about
that which cannot be expressed by words —
after a half-life of a burning desire to write
in order to find myself, suddenly i’ve found
an even more impassioned desire to write
by leaving behind that moulten shell, and
in this moment i find — silence is poetry
when the poet has nothing more to say

Terri Guillemets


A curious glimmering thing

“Time has proved that the function of poetry is not to impart messages, but to explore the depths of emotion.

“The poet is never a teacher, but always a learner. His poem is a venture at perilous discovery. The fact of writing is not the recording of something already known to the poet; it is his method of bringing to the light things that were previously in darkness for him.

“The aim of poetry is to capture those rare moments of the poet’s experience when, for good or for evil, the consciousness of life sweeps through him like a flame… the moments when he becomes passionately aware of the crises of his spirit’s secret drama, and sees a pattern taking shape in the void, and words of utterance come singing to his lips.

“Out of that dizzy instant he emerges, bewildered but excitedly hopeful, bringing with him his poem. Here, he says, is a curious glimmering thing that I discovered far down in the sea of my dimly conscious spirit:  perhaps it will have a fascination for you, too; perhaps you, too, will see in its pale sphere some hint of the iridescent lights that played on its surface when in those vast deeps I found it.”

—Arthur Davison Ficke (1883–1945), “The Nature of Poetry,” 1926

Who Shall Measure?

From my highest hill
I watched for Antares.
Brief would be his glimmer
Where the long line of mountains
Duped the horizon
With vague, rambling mist.

And I shall never know
If that was Antares’
Eye on the earth-line,
Or the gleam of a lantern
The wild poet carried;
For God who saw both
Only laughs when I ask him.

—Olive Tilford Dargan (1869–1968), Lute and Furrow, 1922