Tag sonnet

* throwing things on the floor with Jim Harrison & John Keats

José Angel Araguz 1 Comment

In reading Jim Harrison’s novel The English Major last month, I came across the following and it brought tears – I have been much for tears these days – and mainly because I have been slowly going over poems I have memorized, seeing what stuck and what fell off, and was suddenly surprised to recognize the poem referenced below:

I was saddened by the idea that I might not finish the work before I died, a natural enough fear.  Keats wrote, “When I have fears that I may cease to be before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain…”  That was throwing the raw meat on the floor in a lovely way.

That phrasing throwing the raw meat on the floor – that’s it isn’t it – what it is a poet does no matter the how we use to do it.  We are not in the business of poetry if the raw meat isn’t on the floor.

Realizing I had let the poem slip after a few years, and then coming back to it, memorizing it again – more than an old friend, I felt like a piece of myself was returning, that something understood once was being reconciled in a big, new way.

There’s a lot of history in the poem too: Yeats borrowed the phrasing of high romance, and John Berryman references the end of the poem in the title of his book Love and Fame.  I myself am tempted to borrow and manipulate the phrasing for something called: The Fool-ripened Grain.

Here is the poem below – you can see for yourself how awful and sacrilegious my idea is.

* you let the meat fall where? *

* you let the meat fall where? *

When I have fears that I may cease to be – John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to  be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books in charactery
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;

When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love – then on the shore

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Til love and fame to nothingness do sink.

***

Happy sinking!

Jose

* what a poem does & Russell Edson

José Angel Araguz 2 Comments

What makes them poems is that they are self-contained, and once you read one you have to go back and start reading it again.  That’s what a poem does.
(Charles Simic)

Charles Simic said the above in regards to his own collection, The World Doesn’t End, which consists of a series of prose poems.  I love how true this idea rings – that a poem – sonnet, lyric, or prose poem – exists as a self-contained experience.

However one may feel about prose poems – and there be much controversy even these days – one cannot deny the poetry of something that fits the above.

I mean, there are things that people have said to me in passing that fit these parameters, those parts of conversation you find yourself quoting later, either to others or to yourself.

Makes me think of that George Harrison line: If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there…

In the poem below, Russell Edson goes a few unexpected places.

*the not elephant in the room*

*the not elephant in the room*

The Fall – Russell Edson

There was a man who found two leaves and came indoors holding them out saying to his parents that he was a tree.

To which they said the go into the yard and do not grow in the living-room as your roots may ruin the carpet.

He said I was fooling I am not a tree and he dropped his leaves.

But his parents said look it is fall.

***

Happy falling!

Jose

p.s. Newstand Alert: check out my poem “Reading Hunger” published in the current issue of Gulf Coast!  Info on this issue here.

* photo found here.