Ars Poetica

[med_cat]

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

(Archibald MacLeish)

Comments

[debriswoman]

Beautiful:-)

[med_cat]

Very glad you enjoyed :) Have you read Marianne Moore's?

[debriswoman]

I haven't, but it sounds as though I should:-)

Marianne Moore, "Poetry"

[med_cat]

I'd posted this one, a while back; we read it in high school
**
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.
Marianne Moore

Re: Marianne Moore, "Poetry"

[debriswoman]

Thank you,
I like this a lot. Particularly the opening lines then contradiction. Echoes my thoughts that poems need to be understandable for anyone to make a connection. And that reactions to poems are not necessarily in words:-)

Re: Marianne Moore, "Poetry"

[med_cat]

My pleasure! Very glad you enjoyed it and found it congruent with your own thoughts and opinions on the subject :)

There is also the famous quote of Emily Dickinson's:

"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry."

And going off on a tangent, as to Sherlockian poetry, I came across this the other day: http://www.wessexpress.com/html/bakerstreetballads.html

(seems there is some market for it, after all? ;))

[med_cat]

P.S. You might like two other poems of his I'd posted previously:

http://med-cat.livejournal.com/tag/archibald%20macleish

Re: Marianne Moore, "Poetry"

[debriswoman]

Thank you, I would not class anything I write in this way, of course-more derivative narrative verse than true poetry. I somehow doubt I will take the top of anyone's head off:-)

Thanks for the link, I had not seen that book before. I have come across others who have written a fair amount of Sherlockian verse

http://www.lafterhall.com/pequod1.html

http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDM2189136&R=2189136

http://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/asimov's-sherlockian-limericks/sortby/1/

But I have not read any of the books mentioned:-)

I think verse gets used at various Sherlockian Society meetings, but cannot access much on line-some seem quite secretive:-) Not sure my Seussed solitary cyclist or Clint Eastwood mix would go down too well...

I won't give up the day job just yet:-)

[debriswoman]

I do:-)

[med_cat]

:)

Re: Marianne Moore, "Poetry"

[med_cat]

I was not so classifying your poems (or anyone else's, per se), merely continuing the general discussion of poetry ;)

I think some of your poems would go quite well at a SH society meeting, actually ;)

And yes, those books look interesting; must see sometime if any of them, or the one I showed you, are available at public libraries.

And no, I wasn't advocating giving up the day job, merely remarking on the fact that there is _some_ opportunity for fan poetry publication...;)

Re: Marianne Moore, "Poetry"

[debriswoman]

I know, I was teasing-and did not want to give a false impression of where my verse fits into the general scheme of things:-)

Most seem to be American or Canadian Sherlockian poets, may be it appeals more on your side of the pond. Isaac Asimov is not the first person I would have linked with the subject!

The library had not occurred to me. Ishould investigate.

Yeah, as mentioned before, there are more lucrative directions for fan fic publishing to go in...:-)

Re: Marianne Moore, "Poetry"

[med_cat]

Of course ;)

Re: publishing, again, a general observation only ;)

And yes, Asimov had a wide range of interests; his "Black Widower" short detective stories are quite good; I'd read them in the college library...and his book of regular limericks is rather...risque; so not too sure abt his SH ones.

Interesting observation re: Sherlockian poets.