This September, the excellent Swallow imprint at Ohio University Press will issue the Swallow Anthology of New American Poets, with a foreword by J. D. McClatchy. I would like to present a few poems from the anthology as a little appetizer for the book (which may be preordered on Amazon). I’ll post two poems today, and one each of the remaining days this week.
“Monarch” by Priscilla Becker
Your rule has made an August
of October and I am lazy
in my domicile as maple leaves
turn half yellow and forget
the ailing spectrum.
This season there are many
kings; I’ve made a shrine
to orange things, a coterie
of me and three domestic-
leaning cats whose naps fulfill
a mossy genuflection brought on
by molding walls, delays
in evolution.
I thought I saw you drinking from
a branch between the pickets
of a fence, and in two gestures
you define first aviation,
then verticality. And as I wait
for long-diverted patterns, triumphal
browns, the cat’s serene totem
of itself says there’s a lineage
denied me. Still I would like to rule
a small bud too, but I have neither
your erect and glassy wings nor
did I come from emerald shroud:
I drink the milk of thistle, preferring
it to natural motherings.
"The Starvers" by Geoffrey Brock
Two bull elk lay dead in the snow, antlers
locked. It was October, rutting season,
the Canadian hills were splotched like the sky
with white, and you stood there beside me,
repulsed by the carcasses, by the way
their elk eyes stared dully toward the earth,
the glaze of their astonishment fading.
Just like men, you said, turning
to walk back to the truck, putting that distance
between us. I stayed a while, and winters came,
and summers. I don’t think of you often.
But when the weather’s right, I can see the bulls
sinking down together, wet nostrils flaring
to starve. The does wandering away.
The sky like this one, lurid blue and tilted sharply,
and that single shapely cloud spilling off.
Here are a more quotes from Wystan, on the touchy subject of poets and poetry:
- No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted.
- Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
- It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
- Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another.
- Art is born of humiliation.
- Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
- A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
- A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
- A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
Comments