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Two Poems -- Living Poets
To Live by
Work from the original toward
the beautiful,
unless the latter comes first
in which case
reverse your efforts to find
a model worthy of such
inane desire.
Even the mouth’s being
divided into lips is
not enough to make words
equal themselves.
Eavesdroppers fear
the hermit’s soliloquy.
Wake up, wound, the knife said.
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Bill Knott
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Winter Daydreams
On the boulevard I passed a giant squid.
It manifested but a puny interest in me
or its surroundings, though one suction cup
thoughtfully grazed a ring of spikes around a boulevard tree
like a monocle one puts down absentmindedly
on the page of a newspaper and words like
worker ants quickly spring into action:
“it was not the FIRST TIME THE accused has been so solicited.
By his OWN ADMISsion four other rumpuses were given rise to
After that first YEar . . .”
I was almost home then, by subterfuge or sheer pluck.
In the underbrush a walrus crows,
all decency shed, or shredded.
Little wonder that home is a bright place to be
If living’s your thing.
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John Ashbery
Two living poets, Knott, born 1940, and Ashbery, born 1927, both considered “difficult” poets. Difficult, I guess, in the sense, that their poems don’t make sense to some people, I guess, in the same sense that, for instance, Jackson Pollack’s, or Robert Motherwell's, or Larry River's paintings don’t make sense to some people. Difficult? I don’t think so. Except in a nonsensical sense. Like beauty, difficulty is in the eye of the beholder.
When Bill Knott, who first published in the 60's, could not find a publisher for his poems in the 80's, he stapled together sheaths of poems and mailed them to everyone he knew: they are highly collected now and worth much money, though not to Bill Knott. To Live By is from his 2004, book The Unsubscriber.
John Ashbery, noted art critic for Art News, published Winter Daydreams in his book Chinese Whispers in 2001, when he was 74, and has published several books of poems and of poetic theory since. Ashbery's books first appeared in the 1950's.
Posted at December 7, 2005 12:08 AM