A Tribute Written For One of My Favorite Poets (That Is Not a Beau Présent)

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 24 Comments

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You may be familiar with my series of beau présents recently written as tributes to my favorite poets that I have been posting on this blog lately. Well, the poem I am posting today is not part of that series; it is definitely not a beau présent, anf not actually in any specific poetry form per se (though it  was certainly written in a style meant to emulate the poet I was attempting to honor: E. E. Cummings). The following poem was written over 20 years ago when Peter Mancevice, the publisher of a local poetry journal called Sahara, approached poets in the Worcester, MA area (including myself), asking them to write and submit poems about their favourite poets and the reasons why they liked them for a planned special issue. Apparently there wasn’t a sufficient amount of submissions, and this special edition of the journal never came to fruition. However, Peter did graciously end up publishing my response to his request in their Spring/Summer 2001 issue.  I must note that my poem was first written with very unusual spacing and line breaks in an attempt to imitate Cummings, but unfortunately I found WordPress is unable to preserve the original typography, thus the version you will be reading here has more conventional spacing and lines. Also the first and last lines intentionally reference two of my favorite Cummings’ poems : i like my body when its with your body and somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond.

Here is my poem (I hope you will enjoy it):

why i like reading e. e. cummings

i like my mind when it’s with his mind,
stumbling, sprinting, gliding across a page,
leap-frogging over careening commas,
side-swiping semi-colons; slamming
into unexpected periods. i like zag-zigging
thru an obstacle (of) course of typography
of cntrctng e x p a n d i n g new-ly cooly minted
words scattered splattered here there everywhere –
comprehension slowly sure-ly shifting
from singular difficulty to double “e”s.

nobody, not even an optician from lilliput
clutching his tiny eye chart, has such small “i”s.

—Paul Szlosek

10 Great Quotes About Poetry, Writing, and Art by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 2 Comments

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“What makes poetry? A full heart, brimful of one noble passion.”

“After all, poets shouldn’t be their own interpreters and shouldn’t carefully dissect their poems into everyday prose; that would mean the end of being poets. Poets send their creations into the world, it is up to the reader, the aesthetician, and the critic to determine what they wanted to say with their creations.”

“Writing is busy idleness.”

“True art can only spring from the intimate linking of the serious and the playful.”

If you want to understand poetry, you have to go to its origin. If you want to understand the poet, you have to go to the poet’s home.

“Personality is everything in art and poetry.”

“The question “From where does the poet get it?” addresses only the what, nobody learns anything about the how when asking that question.”

“He who does not expect a million readers should not write a line.*

“Give shape, Artist! Don’t talk! Your poem be but a breath.”

“No concrete object lies outside of the poetic sphere as long as the poet knows how to use the object properly.”

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Art by Edith Sitwell

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 5 Comments

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“The poet is the complete lover of mankind.”

“Poetry ennobles the heart and the eyes, and unveils the meaning of all things upon which the heart and the eyes dwell. It discovers the secret rays of the universe, and restores to us forgotten paradises.”

“In the Augustan age … poetry was … the sister of architecture; with the romantics, and their heightened vowel-sense, resulting in different melodic lines, she became the sister of music; in the present day, she appears like the sister of horticulture, each poem growing according to the law of its own nature.”

“I may say that I think greed about poetry is the only permissible greed – it is, indeed, unavoidable.”

“Isn’t it curious how one has only to open a book of verse to realise immediately that it was written by a very fine poet, or else that it was written by someone who is not a poet at all. In the case of the former, the lines, the images, though they are inherent in each other, leap up and give one this shock of delight. In the case of the latter, they lie flat on the page, never having lived.”

“As for the usefulness of poetry, its uses are many. It is the deification of reality. It should make our days holy to us. The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.”

“Art is magic, not logic. This craze for the logical spirit in irrational shape is part of the present harmful mania for uniformity.”

“My poems are hymns of praise to the glory of life.”

“The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of “a moment of their other lives” – a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.”

“All great poetry is dipped in the dyes of the heart.”

—Edith Sitwell

The Fourth in a Series of Beau Présents Written for My Favorite Poets

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 7 Comments

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This fourth in a series of beau présents written for my favorite poets is meant as a tribute to probably my ultimate fave – the one and only Thomas Lux (in case you haven’t read my previous posts on the form, the beau présent is an usually brief poem composed to honor a person that consists of only words formed from the letters in their name):

A Beau Présent For Thomas Norman Lux

Thomas Lux’s a natural author,
a most moral man (not a trashman
nor a smut mouth, not rash nor lax,
not sour nor ho-hum), a smooth
orator, an ultrasmart annotator,
a solo astronaut, a tutor to lost tarantulas.

Thomas Lux has an autonomous soul,
uses humor to summon truth
& rout out rumor, shouts out
marathon rants to taunt & harass
amoral morons, louts, & trolls,
or to honor an oath to mutual human trust.
.
Thomas Lux’s as hot as arson,
as sonorous as a sonata on an alto sax.
Lux’s our mantra, our motto, our north,
our south, our moon, our sun, our stars,
our sultan, our tsar, our start, our last
hurrah, our utmost, our total – our all!

10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing by Amy Lowell

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 8 Comments

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“Without poetry the soul and heart of man starves and dies.”

“I do not suppose that anyone not a poet can realize the agony of creating a poem. Every nerve, even every muscle, seems strained to the breaking point. The poem will not be denied; to refuse to write it would be a greater torture. It tears its way out of the brain, splintering and breaking its passage, and leaves that organ in the state of a jelly-fish when the task is done.”

“Poets are always the advance guard of literature; the advance guard of life. It is for this reason that their recognition comes so slowly.”

“I never deny poems when they come; whatever I am doing, whatever I am writing, I lay it aside and attend to the arriving poem.”

“Poetry, far more than fiction, reveals the soul of humanity.”

“Poetry is the most concentrated form of literature; it is the most emotionalized and powerful way in which thought can be presented.”

“Polyphonic prose is a kind of free verse, except that it is still freer. Polyphonic makes full use of cadence, rime, alliteration, assonance.”

“To understand Vers libre, one must abandon all desire to find in it the even rhythm of metrical feet. One must allow the lines to flow as they will when read aloud by an intelligent reader.”

“Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.”

“God made me a business woman, and I made myself a poet.”

—Amy Lowell

10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing By Stephen Dobyns

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 9 Comments

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“One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.”

“Writing is a job, a craft, and you learn it by trying to write every day and by facing the page with humility and gall. And you have to love to read books, all kinds of books, good books. You are not looking for anything in particular; you are just letting stuff seep in.”

“I write poems to find out why I write them.”

“I can’t believe there is a poet who hasn’t eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It’s part of the process of selection.”

“Many of my poems try to use a comic element to reach a place that isn’t comic at all. The comic element works as a surprise. It is unexpected and energizing.”

“My poems always begin with a metaphor, but my way into the metaphor may be a word, an image, even a sound. And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness that is much like the feel of a fish brushing against a hook.”

“A poem is a window that hangs between two or more human beings who otherwise live in darkened rooms.”

“For the past thirty years or so, much American poetry has been marked by an earnestness that rejects the comic. This has nothing to do with seriousness. The comic can be very serious. The trouble with the earnest is that it seeks to be commended. It seeks to be praised for its intention more than for what it is saying.”

“Poetry is a craft that one learns over a long period of time. But you only learn it if certain gifts are there to begin with – an imagination, the ability to make metaphor, a sense of language and rhythm and sound. intelligence, passion, curiosity, a great deal of empathy, and a fire in the belly.”

“Poetry… creates a metaphor, which enables the reader to experience what you have experienced with a kind of specificity and depth that is not possible in casual language, partly because the form also communicates the information.”

— Stephen Dobyns

“Found” American Sentences

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 13 Comments

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERABeing so gratified by the enthusiastic response to my recent post on the American Sentence (with so many readers trying their own hand at writing one as well as linking that post to their own blogs), I decided to write some more on the subject. Doing research on the net, I discovered the delightful practice of people searching for “found” American sentences buried in a variety of literature such as novels and short stories (thanks to an informative post by Sue Walker on the Negative Capability Press website). So I have attempted mining for some poetic treasure of my own in two classic novels by two of my favorite writers. The following are the results of my literary treasure hunt (with some of the original sentences slightly altered and edited to fit the rules of the American Sentence of 17 syllables being written in a single line as a complete grammatical sentence). First, here are three gorgeous “found” American Sentences written by Ray Bradbury, who I feel may be the most exquisite writer of poetic prose of all time, from his novel Dandelion Wine:

His fingers trembled, bright with blood, like the bits of a strange flag now found
— Ray Bradbury

Birds flickered like skipped stones across the vast inverted pond of heaven
— Ray Bradbury

Bees have a smell, their feet are dusted with spice from a million flowers
— Ray Bradbury

And here are three by Raymond Chandler from his first novel The Big Sleep (the last one might just be my favorite American Sentence ever):

Mid-October is the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain
—Raymond Chandler

His heart was a brief, uncertain murmur, his thoughts were as gray as ashes
—Raymond Chandler

The old man nodded, as if his neck was afraid of the weight of his head
—Raymond Chandler

So what do you think, dear readers? Are you now inspired to start searching for possible American Sentences in your own favorite books?  I sure hope you are, and if you find any good ones, that you will share your bounty with us all!

 

10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 11 Comments

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“Poetry: the best words in the best order.”

“Works of imagination should be written in very plain language; the more purely imaginative they are, the more necessary it is to be plain.”

“What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole. Its body brevity, and wit its soul.”

“Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward; it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me.”

“A poet ought not to pick nature’s pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.”

“When a man is unhappy he writes damned bad poetry…”

“Iambics march from short to long;–
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapaests throng.”

“No man was ever yet a great poet, without being at the same time a profound philosopher.”

“Poetry is the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge, human thoughts, human passions, emotions, language.”

“Sir, I admit your general rule, That every poet is a fool, But you yourself may serve to show it, That every fool is not a poet.”

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Invented Poetry Forms – The American Sentence

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 40 Comments

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Today’s post is on the American Sentence, a poetry form invented by the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in the mid-1980’s as a twist on traditional haiku. Like haiku, American Sentences consist of 17 syllables, but instead of being arranged into three lines, they are written as a single line or sentence. They also may or may not have a title.

As far as the other rules of the form, there seems to be varying opinions. Many seem to feel the poem should be just one complete grammatical sentence, while others have written them as two, three, or four or even just as series of phrases. Paul E. Nelson (the poet most associated with the American Sentence, besides Ginsberg) emphasizes the use of concrete images though ones written by others often deal with abstractions. Ginsberg, himself, stated that the poem, if possible should mention either a time or place (or both) and the use of articles such as “a” and “the” should be avoided. But even he didn’t always follow the last suggestion as seen in these four of the original American Sentences composed by Ginsberg:

Nov 1991 N.Y.

Put my tie on in a taxi, short of breath, rushing to meditate

—Allen Ginsberg

Tompkins Square Lower East Side N.Y.

Four skinheads stand in the streetlight rain chatting under an umbrella

—Allen Ginsberg

On Hearing the Muezzin Cry Allah Akbar While Visiting the Pythian Oracle at Didyma Toward the End of the Second Millennium

At sunset Apollo’s columns echo with the bawl of the One God

—Allen Ginsberg

Approaching Seoul by Bus in Heavy Rain

Get used to your body, forget you were born, suddenly you got to get out!

—Allen Ginsberg

In comparison, here are four American Sentences that I attempted:

Boulevard Diner

The ham slices squeal on the smoking grill like the ghosts of dying pigs

The Sad Truth About Aging

To grow old is to witness your world being dismantled around you

The Gambler’s Mantra

Luck is a middle finger waved in the face of probability

An Urban Stroll a Week After a Winter Storm

Propelled by my feet, chunks of frozen snow skitter down gritty sidewalks

As you can see, some of my American Sentences adhered to some of the rules stated above, while some others didn’t at all. If you decide to try your own hand at writing one (I really hope you do), please feel free to pick and choose which rules you want to follow. The only vital rule that should not be ignored is that the American Sentence be 17 syllables and written in one line.

 

10 Great Quotes About Poets, Poetry, and Writing By Bruce Smith

~ Paul Szlosek ~ 9 Comments

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“When the language [of a poem] works to seduce and . . . move us, when it works its blues on us, bounces us and trembles us, makes us swerve from our upright and rational propositions . . . we are thinking and listening at the same time or really listening and not thinking, like a good song does.”

“Write like a lover. Write like you’re leaving yourself for another.”

“Isn’t a book of poems with its thin spine and blank spaces a blunt cutting edge toward what’s left undone and an echo or call or wish to sound the Blank with a few notes? It’s a pathetic furthering through the medium of words and figures, rhythms, and honks and slurs.”

“In jail, poetry was to become something else: a spoon with which to tunnel through the wall. Contrary to what you might expect poetry and books had an impact in the joint.”

“Does anyone who calls themselves a poet have more than a series of strikes and counterstrikes, a succession of vowels and consonants, air obstructed or not, grooves and breaks, and visitations and melancholy fits and carpal tunnel and history and suffering and a poem followed by the next poem sewn into fascicles and put in a box under the bed.“

“Inspiration is for suckers. Talk about process impedes the process. Work the work.”

“When a poem would neither praise nor blame, it ends up praising; its figural language heightens any subject and gives it, in capable hands, a nobility.”

“If a central dilemma of poetry is a compulsion to understand the world versus a desire to see beyond the details, to which side do you belong? ”

“The acoustic qualities of poetry supply a beat, a pulse and a value not found in the semantic values of the words. My relationship to sounds is like my relationship to my kid making noise in the other room; I wish she’d be quiet, but I love her, and I can’t help listening to and being moved by the sounds.”

“Poetry generally is a verbal configuration of personality.”

—Bruce Smith