The first two parts were written as calendar notes on my cell phone, since I had no pen.
Three Poems of Everyday
1. Shoe SalesmanWithout a pen, I write
my poems on the soles of people's feet.
2. BuilderI build to someone else's plan,
but how many poets measure
their verse to meter long since sung?
A plan is empty space until
I raise the beams of reality.
3. BakerI've never tasted words
written on a white page,
or smelled a description
early in the morning.
You can hold my work in
your hand, taste it, smell it...
Or would you rather read
about those in a book?
posted by Lee @ 21:50
6 comments
6 Comments:
I like these, especially the baker.
Thanks. I like them, too. Though I like the baker's bit, I was worried that it was too anti-poetry. The first two parts had ordinary people making their work as beautiful as the poet's. I liked the idea that poetry is written all around us. But the baker seems a bit holier than thou. Instead of saying, "My poems are tasty." He says, "Your poems aren't tasty."
These poems come directly from pondering the world with Wallace Stevens in mind. I bought the Library of America edition of his collected works before leaving America and it was the best money I've spent in a long time. I am reading something from his notebooks called Adagia. These fragments (almost pensee on poetry) combined with an earlier delight from the Man on the Dump are the inspiration for this worldview. Here are some samples directly relating to these poems (the first is the bit from Man on the Dump):
"...and the janitor's poems / Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears, / The cat in the paper-bag, the corset the box / From Esthonia..."
"Poetry is the expression of the experience of poetry."
"The poet feels abundantly the poetry of everything."
There are many others that do not lead to shoe salesman poets, but I will not quote them. I will leave it with a final warning (which I think is funny and true),
"To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as to have something to say."
I wouldn't call it holier-than-thou. I think it points to the fundemntal problem wih all arts having nothing directly to do with one's survival.
I suppose the poet would claim that writing is so necessary to his life that he would whither without it; but, I have a tendency to scoff at such hyperboyle.
By the, whay have you heard of a book called The Good Life by the Nearings (Scott and Linda, I think). These folks dropped out of society after the Great Deppression and became subsistance farmers. Inspiring stuff...
One of there "rules" for living came directly out of Bertrand Russel: do bread labor (farming, building houses, construction roads, maple tree-sapping) for only 4 hours a day and have 4 hours of leisure time.
Now that's my kind of living.
I am really fond of the shoe salesman. Do you know this:
--
Artichoke
by Joe Hutchinson
Oh heart weighed down by so many wings.
--
You cant hear Ted Kooser talk for five minutes without him mentioning it.
I did not know that poem, thanks. It is so simply excellent it makes my heart sing. And I agree that the shoe salesman shares a mood with it. I'm really fond of all three of these everyday poems, but the shoe salesman is so simple and yet poetic that it is the best.
Without knowing what Haiku is supposed to evoke (in a Japanese mind), I think the Artichoke and the shoe salesman fit my idea of it. Ditch the baggage of syllable counts that don't translate, ditch the necessary seasonal reference and cut straight to the heart of the matter.
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