How To Eat a Poem
by Eve Merriam
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Don't be polite.
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may run down your chin.
It is ready and ripe now, whenever you are.You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away.
Bite in.
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice that
I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose
and would let us understand each other without exposing
the author or reader to sublime agonies.
In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.
That's why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,
though it's an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.
It's hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,
when so often they're put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.
What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons,
who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,
and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,
work at changing his destiny for their convenience?
It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today,
and so you may think that I am only joking
or that I've devised just one more means
of praising Art with the help of irony.
There was a time when only wise books were read,
helping us to bear our pain and misery.
This, after all, is not quite the same
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.
And yet the world is different from what it seems to be
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
People therefore preserve silent integrity,
thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.
The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person,
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,
and invisible guests come in and out at will.
What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.
Berkeley, 1968
translated by Czeslaw Milosz
and Lillian Valle
(top)
Dylan Thomas
| In My Craft or Sullen Art |
| In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart. Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I srite On these spindrift pages Nor for the towering dead With their nightingales and psalms But for the lovers, their arms Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art. |
Notes on the Art of Poetry
|
Poetic Manifesto, 1961
I fell in love
� that is the only expression I can think of
� at once,
and am still at the mercy of words, though sometimes now, knowing a
little of their behavior very well, I think I can influence them
slightly and have even learned to beat them now and then, which they
appear to enjoy.
"Poetic Manifesto" in the Texas Quarterly, Winter 1961 
The
best craftsman always leaves holes and gaps in the works of the poem so
that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or
thunder in. The joy and function of poetry is, and was, the celebration
of man, which is also the celebration of God.
"Poetic Manifesto" in the Texas Quarterly, Winter 1961
You
can tear a poem apart to see what makes it technically tick, and say to
yourself, when the works are laid out before you, the vowels, the
consonants, the rhymes or rhythms, "Yes this is it. This is why the
poem moves me so. It is because of the craftsmanship." But you're back
again where you began. You're back with the mystery of having been
moved by words.
"Poetic Manifesto" in the Texas Quarterly, Winter 1961
I
am a painstaking, conscientious, involved and devious craftsman in
words, however unsuccessful the result so often appears, and to
whatever wrong uses I may apply my technical paraphernalia. I use
everything and anything to make my poems work and move in the direction
I want them to: old tricks, new tricks, puns, portmanteau-words,
paradox, allusion, paronomasia, paragram, catachresis, slang,
assonantal rhymes, vowel rhymes, sprung rhythm. Every device there is
in language is there to be used if you will. Poets have got to enjoy
themselves sometimes, and the twisting and convolutions of words, the
inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of
the painful, voluntary work.
Notes on the Art of Poetry, 1951 The Poet
by Pablo Neruda
in the midst of my mournful devotions; that time
when I cherished a leaflet of quartz,
and stared at a lifetime's vocation.
I ranged in the markets of avarice
where goodness is bought for a price, breathed
the insensate miasmas of envy, the inhuman
contention of masks and existences.
I endured in the bog-dweller's element; the lily
that breaks on the water in a sudden
disturbance of bubbles and blossoms, devoured me.
Whatever the foot sought, the spirit deflected,
or sheered toward the fang of the pit.
So my poems took beina, in travail
retrieved from the thorn, like a penance,
wrenched by a seizure of hands, out of solitude;
or they parted for burial
their secretest flower in immodesty's garden.
Estranged to myself, like shadow on water
that moves through a corridor's fathoms,
I sped through the exile of each man's existence,
this way and that, and so, to habitual loathing;
for I saw that their being was this: to stifle
one half of existence's fullness like fish
in an alien limit of ocean. And there,
in immensity's mire, I encountered their death;
Death grazing the barriers,
Death opening roadways and doorways.
|
The common thread that unites Octavio Paz' various literary and social
identities is his enduring commitment to the complex communicability of
metaphorical language. "Poetry
makes things more transparent and clearer and teaches us to respect men
and nature," Paz insists. A writer of
interpenetrations�of solitude and solitarity, of
clarity and
allusiveness, of Mexican specificity and international
applicability�Paz won the 1990 Nobel Prize in literature. |
| Transcript of Nobel acceptance speech: English, Spanish |