rat bastard

"The poet is the weak criminal whose confession implicates the others."

--Howard Nemerov

Comments

[ARS]

If you are going to be blogging about humour and Howard Nemerov, you might as well include some funny Howard Nemerov.

Strange Metamorphosis of Poets

From epigram to epic is the course
For riders of the American winged horse.
They change their size and sex over the years,
The voice grows deeper and the beard appears;
Running for greatness they sweat away their salt,
They start out Emily and wind up Walt.

On Being a Member of the Jury for a Poetry Prize

Jury's the mot juste under our ground rules:
I may say guilty, and I mostly do,
But sentencing's beyond me, poeticules,
As, by your poems, it's beyond most of you.

[JL]

The second of those is one of my favorites. I was reminded of it when reading the essay that contains the quote I posted. There's a passage in which Nemerov objects to Archibald MacLeish's famous formulation that "A poem should not mean / But be," as it "has been so often quoted at me by all sorts and conditions of people who appeared to take some kind of obscure and possibly sinister comfort from them." He considers whether its meaning, though, might be found in experience: "When I used to help edit a literary magazine called Furioso, every mail brought to my desk a large number of poems which perfectly fitted the definition: they meant nothing and there they were."