I just finished reading James Schuyler's Morning of the Poem out loud to myself and it frickin' blew my mind. Here's a sample:
So many lousy poets
So few good ones
What's the problem?
No innate love of
Words, no sense of
How the thing said
Is in the words, how
The words are themselves
The thing said: love,
Mistake, promise, auto
Crack-up, color, petal,
The color in the petal
Is merely light
And that's refraction:
A word, that's the poem.
A blackish-red nasturtium.
Roses shed on
A kitchen floor, a
Cool and scented bed
To loll and roll on.
I wish I had a rose
Or butterfly tattoo:
But where? Here on
My arm or my inner
Thigh, small, where
Only the happy few
Might see it? I'll
Never forget that
Moving man, naked to
The waist a prize-
Fight buckle on his
Belt (Panama) and
Flying high on each
Pectoral a bluebird
On tan sky skin. I
Wanted to eat him up:
No such luck. East
28th Street, 1950.
How the roses pass.
posted by Justin
3 comments:
"Poem should create the impression of a single correctly spelled word" - Franz W
"Poems should create the impression of a new word that miraculously feels like a future home"
Poems should create the impression that there not only suddenly stands, but has always existed, outside the senses, outside of individual consciousness, a new category in which reality is altered to allow a previously uninvited world, spinning, backwards, on an unseen, parallel axis, illuminating, briefly, some scale of life— a fish flapping on the shore, the sun shining, catching the body just right, the light stepping in, the last O.
--I'm pretty sure Poe said that.
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