CALIFORNIA by Hayden Carruth
              
                     for Adrienne Rich

To come again into the place of revolutionary
thought after years in the wilderness
of complacency and hard-eyed greed
and brutality
is extraordinary. A's kitchen
in Santa Cruz
isn't greatly different from her kitchen in
West Barnet in the old days,
small interesting ornaments here and there,
many good things to eat—
and how ideas flew from stove to table,
from corner to corner. In Santa Cruz
after twenty-odd years it was the same. Tolstoi said
the purpose of poetry is to provoke
feeling in the reader, to "infect" the reader,
he said,—and so to induce a change,
a change of conscience
that may lead to a change in the world, that will
lead to a change in the world!
How can poetry be written by people who want no change?

To be reconciled after so long,
in sunshine, among Latino voices. A. showed me
where earthquake two years ago had changed Santa Cruz
and how the people were rebuilding, making it better. Had she
been frightened? Of course. Would she move away?
Never. Here earth itself gives us the paradigm.
And the great ocean hurling its might always thunderously against
the land at Half Moon Bay is our measure
of flux and courage
and eternity.

We drove among hills, redwood and eucalyptus,
dense growth, the richness and ramifying intricacy
of the world's loveliness, and asked
what would be left
for our grandchildren, already born, when they are
as old as we? No longer do we
need an insane president to end us
by pushing a button. People
need only go on living as they are, without change,
the complacent and hard-eyed
everywhere. At the airport
after dark
among hard lights
with the massive proportions of human energy
surrounding them, two old people
embraced in love of the injured and poor, of poetry,
of the world in its still remaining remote possibilities,
which were themselves.

I KNOW HOW EVERY POET by James Laughlin

feels about his new poem
(and usually every poem)

it's the best he ever
wrote and better than

anybody else's rush it
off to a magazine the

presses are waiting they
say there are a hundred

thousand poets writing
in the USA (maybe more)

and if each one writes
at least one poem a week

that's a lot of diffused
satisfaction but Horace

was smarter he put his
new poems in a trunk

and left them there for
seven years or so he said

but I don't believe him.

A TAO OF POETRY
(an excerpt)      by Sam Hamill

Each word carefully
tied to the next, the poem
is a net, and no
single knot is strong enough
to bear the burden alone.

Some nets are small, cast
for shrimp or herring. Some nets
are meant to hold whales.
In the ecology of
the poem, the fish is not

prey, but the surprise
catch of the day, a diamond
in the coal, a way
of awakening to something
just beyond what words can say.

ALWAYS ON THE TRAIN  by Ruth Stone

Writing poems about writing poems
is like rolling bales of hay in Texas.
Nothing but the horizon to stop you.

But consider the railroad's edge of metal trash;
bird perches, miles of telephone wires.
What is so innocent as grazing cattle?
If you think about it, it turns into words.

Trash is so cheerful, flying up
like grasshoppers in front of the reaper.
The dust devil whirls it aloft: bronze candy wrappers,
squares of clear plastic—windows on a house of air.

Below the weedy edge in last year's mat,
red and silver beer cans.
In bits blown equally everywhere,
the gaiety of flying paper
and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds.

LOVE POEM by Erin Belieu

...Do not write love poems;
avoid at first those forms
that are too facile and common-
place: they are the most difficult...

R M. Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet

There are too many similes for bed—
nothing at all like the things I've said
scribbling late this last hour;

not like the boats I've rigged, or rivers either,
designed for us to float. Metaphor
sinks what I meant to say.

And about what Rilke says, I know even
his angels wont save me now; heaven
is much too terrible to leave.

So all you get to know is that I'm trying,
my tongue not a stupid girl crying
down my throat, wet and speechless.

ARS POETICA by Dana Levin

Six monarch butterfly cocoons
                    clinging to the back of your throat—

                     you could feel their gold wings trembling.

You were alarmed.  You felt infested.
In the downstairs bathroom of the family home,
                   gagging to spit them out—
                                           and a voice saying Don't, don't—

ART CLASS by James Galvin

Let us begin with a simple line,
Drawn as a child would draw it,
To indicate the horizon,

More real than the real horizon,
Which is less than line,
Which is visible abstraction, a ratio.

The line ravishes the page with implications
Of white earth, white sky!

The horizon moves as we move,
Making us feel central.
But the horizon is an empty shell—

Strange radius whose center is peripheral.
As the horizon draws us on, withdrawing,
The line draws us in,

Requiring further lines,
Engendering curves, verticals, diagonals,
Urging shades, shapes, figures...

What should we place, in all good faith,
On the horizon? A stone?
An empty chair? A submarine?

Take your time. Take it easy.
The horizon will not stop abstracting us.

COMMENT ON THIS: IN THE REAL
SCHEME OF THINGS, POETRY IS
MARGINAL    by Richard Jones

All things—
the empty wine bottle under the bed,
the silver brush on the vanity,
an untended garden behind an empty house,
willow branches, a handful
of dirt thrown down in the grave—
all things flow one into another
like lines of poems that take me
to the far reaches
of myself
where I meet you.
Remember:
when Emily Dickinson said,
"I'm nobody;"she spoke for us all.

THIS ART poems about poetry  A Copper Canyon Press Anthology

In more than one hundred poems, sixty poets from around the world explore the nature and function of poetry, whether directly or obliquely, finding mystery, paradox, and fullness in an art made of common everyday speech.  Editor Michael Wiegers writes in his introduction, "Often the loudest arguments on behalf of poetry are made in prose.   Meanwhile, the more convincing arguments are sung in poems.

ForPoetry