writing

An Artist’s Sorrows

As the nightingale went home in the morning and hung his golden harp on the peg, he said in a bitter tone — ’Let them be sure of this, I will not sing again.’

And his wife came up to him with chirpings and hoppings to soothe him:  but nothing availed; it was clear to all that he was bitterly affronted.

Every night he went out and sang his loves to the rose; the night air throbbed and quivered to the sound.

His wife sat at home, and was contented if he was happy; moreover, she thought that, however his love raged, no harm could possibly come of it.

And now at her entreaty he told her of his sorrows, and how deeply he was wounded by what had passed.

‘I sang sweetly! I sang sweetly! the rose opened her leaves; it seemed to me that the moon rose earlier than her wont.

‘All things listened — all things near and far off listened, save only the youth and maiden who were close to me.

‘I sang sweetly! I sang sweetly! but they only turned and whispered to each other…’

—V. A. R., “An Artist’s Sorrows,” from the Kamschatskan, Poems, 1867

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

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

Agreed!

“I don’t know of any writer who doesn’t look back at their earlier books and think:  can we just shred them? You know, can we go door to door and collect them and shred them?”

—David Sedaris, to Bill Maher, on Real Time, HBO, 2023 March 24th

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 that moulten shell behind, and
in this moment i find — silence is poetry
when the poet has nothing more to say

—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

Strive & struggle

I am a poet, — though
I’ve yet to write a poem —

when my soul blossoms
and my mind goes free
when I finally let go of
the suffocating shroud
o’er the wildness of me

my beauty will spill out
the ink will overflow and

finally I’ll be able to see
through a sapphire lens
into the heart of infinity

.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

I know I am a poet —
someday — I will be

but the earth hasn’t yet
shattered inside me

.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

I have still only yet got
the seeds of the words
within me; I am learning
and yearning and earning
and living my way toward
being born into harvest

.    .    .    .    .    .    .    .    .

There’s a meteor shower
inside my brain —

stars shooting down
every bright idea
words burning out
before inking the page —

broken-hearted dementia
sleepless engulfing fog —
search and rescue crews
report every line gone

—Terri Guillemets

The Prisoner

If you have not a bird inside you,
      You have no reason to sing.
But if a pent bird chide you,
      A beak and a bleeding wing,
      Then you have reason to sing.

If merely you are clever
      With thoughts and rhymes and words,
Then always your poems sever
      The veins of our singing-birds,
      With blades of glinting words.

Yet if a Song, without ending,
      Inside you choke for breath,
And a beak, devouring, rending,
      Tear through your lungs for breath,
      Sing—or you bleed to death.

—Louis Golding (1895–1958), Sorrow of War, 1919