ARS POETICA #100: I BELIEVE

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”),
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

Elizabeth Alexander

Rebranded

Steubenville, 2013

Everyone saw that picture of me
like trussed game hauled out of the woods.

People in fucking Australia read about me.
We don’t use minors’ names. Like that means a damn.

Two states away, former residents say,
We all know who it is. You should have seen

what she wore to midnight mass Christmas Eve.
Bishops, lawyers talking about lessons for parents,

teachers, community leaders. Like rape
is some fire drill. I learned. There is no safe.

I’m still honor roll, got plans: west coast college
dye my hair, cut it off, watch my glass at all-times.

Trussed game. First kill. A blooded youth,
that stain gone long before the name we burned

into those boys carrying me. Rapist.
Not quarterback. Not wide receiver. Rapist.

Wendy Scott

The harvest of true concentration

No matter how carefully we read or how much attention we bring to bear, a good poem can never be completely entered, completely known. If it is the harvest of true concentration, it will know more than can be said in any other way. And because it thinks by music and image, by story and passion and voice, poetry can do what other forms of thinking cannot: approximate the actual flavour of life, in which subjective and objective become one, in which conceptual mind and the inexpressible presence of things become one.

Letting this wideness of being into ourselves, as readers or as writers, while staying close to the words themselves, we begin to find in poems a way of entering both language and being on their own terms. Poetry leads us into the self, but also away from it. Transparency is both capacious and focused. Free to turn inward and outward, free to remain still and wondering amid the mysteries of mind and world, we arrive, for a moment, at a kind of fullness that overspills into everything. One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read — in such a moment, anything can happen. The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind’s knowledge. The lit and shadowed placed within us can be warmed.

Jane Hirshfield
Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry

loved to be petted and entertained

She reminded Will of a cat who lived in a gristmill in his hometown. The cat, small and solid, all efficient muscle, greeted visitors with benign good nature and loved to be petted and entertained. But its greatest delight was battle; it killed rats and thieving birds with heart-stopping speed and precision, and it was always on watch for more opportunities for murder. Sala was like that, William thought: cold-bloodedly amiable.

Rosemary Kirstein
The Steerswoman

Additional Rehearsals

1
Use perpetuates use, alters the savage point of the robust, attenuated beestings

Savagery would recede into white moths
When and if light—
Bulbs traced the trade-in
Small valise with damages assigned
Careers with centres fuelling
Postcard views of corresponding
Limitations

Slow-gone finesse appraising witnessed
Protectorate the staff shaded
Other blood with elm leaves over—
Cast and mentioned ruse-laned
Chores meant to be titled
Whereupon the silver termed
A patron saint with sworn
Bullets to match offhand corruption

2
Pharmacopeia delimits precinct class learning to rise, consecutively thereon rising

Knee-high trees induce a parody of shade,
The brook about to be in shadow
Laps rhythm to presume
A twinge of partial blue against this rain
Still focus free though driving time
Into arrest, reprisal stiffens amnesty
Aghast with say-so spears
Of fate planning on start-time

Penitents come under columns we reduce to
Facts, extraneous indemnity defies
A plenary recombinate incense
Of brittle gray within
His beard, what right does the accused,
According to precise examination,
Eyes closed, meanwhile, toward
Occurring sleep on stand

3
Pilates, until she crouched in a neglectful way, tilled soil, waxlike flowers

False convection oven, chalice after
Bread, diminution clears the head,
Practice defines the cure, ought not be
Furiously scented, brash, confining
Porous lethal rasp a vested crewcut
Vantage-pointed white lead light
What helps a person sleep equals
What reveals some spurious-lined
Charity

She mauves her way across
Usurpides, comes clingingly fast-forward
In a wrested speech to magnify
The lariat of creased moon
Laden with contextual haze
As motioning as silo wash
Some armature that fails to snap
From generator disarming
Whatever sentence has been
Seaming lace

4
Till the spoils as fast as sleep quips to the side catastrophe respun

Folk wise – chortled means less fast
As queried silence previously splashed
Against windshield rinsed as
Colter past to dim the fan lift
Against what would be same-faced
Bracketed just slight
As referenda lying fallow as a smock
With no one shuttered in

The limbs are clocked with dazzle
Crew-necked rain endears us all
To one another, streamlined as canary —
Veined encyclical detained in glory,
Sparred clasp storied as the gentle
Park, a voyage through attuned
As water sport, as cleared fin
Dreaming through saddened water
5
Semble predicated on long thin silver lines of code, intensively approximate

Veins in his neck failed to have cleared,
Although he had proposed a resolution
To himself, the rector stowed the priest’s
Wares for the good of the whole Stackhouse
Vaulted into facelift gesture
A rock Cornish game hen where the dances
Blur a lariat fling
Strained permanence

Were the antecedents perfectly with charity
When the choice blurred surely
Picturesque in time for boneless breast
To be consumed, the rest is slept
Into then tricked afraid by lemony
Waltz tokened to mean sizzling
With a chestnut dream,
Baking all night, the seamed vibrato
That accompanied his wanting

6
Serene fronds limit free toned immanence pale on command retraced and lacing

Providence is shaped like shear young curtains
Come to roost, her bearing walls were sleek,
It mattered how and when the free fall torsioned
Down the lake effect of street,
Our full snow days for skiing come to pass
In memory, in melody, in rhythmic thrusts
Of purple woven shock waves

Tine glimmer the occasioned sun,
An earnest money showcase dims the spun eccentric
Live one, striped as decimated simulcast, the envy
Of the population of all wheatfields,
Grasped and tendered and eventually released

Sheila Murphy

the saddest book I have ever read

I think that the Journal of Katherine Mansfield is the saddest book I have ever read. Here, set down in exquisite fragments, is the record of six lonely and tormented years, the life’s-end of a desperately ill woman. So private is it that one feels forever guilty of prying for having read it.

Her journal was her dear companion. “Come, my unseen, my unknown, let us walk together,” she says to it.   Only in its pages could she show her tragically sensitive mind, her lovely, quivering soul. She was not of the little breed of the discontented; she was of the high few fated to be ever unsatisfied. Writing was the precious thing in life to her, but she was never truly pleased with anything she had written. With a sort of fierce austerity, she strove for the crystal clearness, the hard, bright purity from which streams perfect truth. She never felt that she had attained them.

Journal of Katherine Mansfield is a beautiful book and an invaluable one, but it is her own book, and only her dark, sad eyes should have read its words. I closed it with a little murmur to her portrait on the cover. “Please forgive me,” I said.

Dorothy Parker
The Private Papers of the Dead