I was reading a new anthology,_This Art: poems about poetry_ edited by
Michael Wiegers from Copper Canyon and some of the poems in it struck me in
terms of these questions about poetry and war. So I will type in a few short
excerpts, a kind of poetic conversation.
What is it all for, this poetry,
This bundle of accomplishment
Put together with so much pain?
Do you remember the corpse in the basement?
What are we doing at the turn of our years,
Writers and readers of the liberal weeklies?
(Kenneth Rexroth, "August 22, 1939)
The poem wants to look forward, not
back, but out there as far as it can see
are ruins: body of Abel body of god body
of smoke. And no recognizable
child to mourn. . .
The poem wants to get out of
where it is. But is instructed
to remember. In shameless daylight.
By rivers of salt.
(Shirley Kaufman, "Rivers of Salt")
No, what I have been trying to say
Is that neither of the quaint immemorial views of poetry is
adequate for us.
A poem is not an expression, nor is it an object. Yet it somewhat
partakes of both. What a poem is
Is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful
. . .
. . . . . . . . . . . I think the poem is not
Transparent, as some have said, not a looking-glass, as some have
also said.
Yet it has almost the quality of disappearance
In its cage of visibility. It disperses among the words. It is a
fluidity, a vapor, of love.
(Hayden Carruth,"The Impossible Indispensability of the Ars Poetica")
And lastly from Vicente Aleixandre, translated by Lewis Hyde, the opening
lines and ending of "Who I Write For:"
Historians and newsmen and people who are just curious ask me,
Who am I writing for?
. . .
For the bully and the bullied, the good and the sad, the voice
with no substance
and all the substance of the world.
For you, the man with nothing that will turn into a god, who
reads these words without desire.
For you, and everything alive inside of you,
I write, and write.
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
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