Unless you are at home in metaphor, unless you have had your proper education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and in its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history.
Robert Frost
Catherine Madsen
The Bones Reassemble: Reconstituting Liturgical Speech
so, I’ve still not really forgiven Billy Collins for the Emily Dickinson poem, but I love this closing image. And it has bees…
Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
This physical world has no two things alike.
Every comparison is awkwardly rough.
You can put a lion next to a man,
but the placing is hazardous to both.
Rumi, translation by Colman Barks
We sat together at one summer’s end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, ‘A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
Is to work harder than all these, and yet
Be thought an idler by the noisy set
Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen
The martyrs call the world.’
from Yeats, “Adam’s Curse”
from Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Poetry, chapter three
The fact is that poetry in general involves, necessarily, a linear development of meaning, which means that in one respect it is a linear form of thinking or imagining. “Those images that yet/fresh images beget,” Yeats wrote in one of his most famous poems about art and the imagination, and that approximately, is the way most poems would seem to work: one image suggest a related one, or a further manifestation of the same underlying image; one idea leads to a cognate or consequent one; one pattern of sound, interinvolved with a particular semantic direction, leads to a similar pattern that reinforces some underlying similarity of suggestive antithesis of meaning.
The Sound of Silence
Elliott batTzedek
Reunion tour, two men, singing in tempo, in tune,
in time, but in no visible intimacy.
They sang how terribly strange to be
seventy—poignancy of what youth couldn’t know
dulled by pre-arranged contractual promise of an audience
coming to deliver poignancy.
Crash course of greatest duo hits, crowd sighing
none of us are young anymore remember when?
The Everly Brothers are still alive?
Then those first solo songs, all Paul,
oh what he could do with lyric and line, so fine,
so lush. So full, so complete. Then that most
familiar high tenor was suddenly there.
There, where it hadn’t been but had to be.
There, one song then the next. Each one created
unfinished. In everything an empty space
for this voice, in every foundation a crack sealed
with session takes so only one would feel
the chill wind howling through.
He left a space in everything, a space that cast
a lanky bushy-haired shadow. Those city boys,
those neighborhood boys, this loss
that only love could lose.
What my love could never lose is its dignity, gained
by struggle, gay and lesbian brought out of shadow
into space blown open for complex sexualities.
Still, when I think of the road we’ve traveled on, I wonder
what we’ve lost, why we have no word for them,
these two aging men, with their passionate love played
on stage and jumbotron every night. If they,
if I, if you, make love, and refuse to mean
a trite euphemism for genital muscle spasms,
then in place of a name for this love I have
only longing and silence. And didn’t we dream
those would shatter no more souls? But here
we are. We’ve bought the tickets and t-shirts and yet
what we clearly see confuses us. But I know
how love sounds when it’s sung, and it’s alright,
it’s all right, it’s all right. And we’re trying to get,
that’s all, that’s all, that’s all
we’re trying to get the rest.
Notes
I would never have heard the space, my ears don’t work like that. Otter heard it, it made her cry, and me too, when she explained why what I was hearing mattered. Poets are like crows, I think, gathering shiny things, a habit some call theft but crows call instinct. So the insight is Otter’s shiny thing, and the poem is mine.
This poem has been sitting in me, trying to find a shape, since 2003. That it came out now was in part triggered by watching an astounding video of Paul Simon singing “American Tune” with just his guitar on
1. I used to talk like this all the time, back in my UCIrvine critical theory experiment
2. Here’s what Barbara Herrnstein Smith says, which is incredibly useful:
As soon as we perceive that a verbal sequence has a sustained rhythm, that it is formally structured according to a continuously operating principle of organization, we know that we are in the presence of poetry and we respond to it accordingly […] expecting certain effects from it and not others, granting certain conventions to it and not others. One of the most significant effects of meter (or, more broadly, of principles of formal structure) in poetry is simply to inform the reader that he [sic] is being confronted by poetry and not by anything else… Meter serves, in other words, as a frame for the poem, separating it from a ‘ground’ of less highly structured speech and sound.
3. So I’ve usually written a very free verse, where what marks it as “poetry” is short lines and more metaphorical language. Do these say “poetry” to readers? Do they say enough?
4. Who are these readers who read enough poetry to know it as different from the ground when they read it?
from “Proverbs and Songs”
Dedicated to Jose Ortega y Gasset
Antonio Machado
IV
But look in your mirror for the other one,
the other one who walks by your side.
V
Between living and dreaming
there is a third thing.
Guess it.
XV
Look for your other half
who walks always next to you
and tends to be what you aren’t.
XVII
In my solitude
I have seen things very clearly
that were not true.
XVIII
Water is good, so is thirst;
shadow is good, so is sun;
the honey from the rosemarys
and the honey of the bare fields.
XXI
Form your letters slowly and well:
making things well
is more important than making them.
XXIV
Wake up, you poets:
let echoes end,
and voices begin.
XXV
But don’t hunt for dissonance;
because, in the end, there is no dissonance.
When the sound is heard people dance.
XXVI
What the poet is searching for
is not the fundamental I
but the deep you.
XXVIII
Beyond living and dreaming
there is something more important:
waking up.
XXXIV
If a poem becomes common,
passed around, hand to hand, it’s OK:
gold is chosen for coins.
XL
But art?
It is pure and intense play,
so it is like pure and intense life,
so it is like pure and intense fire.
You’ll see the coal burning.
I think that what poets do is decipher silence.
Ekiwah Adler Beléndez
What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?
Audre Lorde
This Frenzy 