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Originally Posted by Moony
I have a question for you, Jyqm. Who is your favorite poet, or, what is your favorite poem if you had to choose?
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Oh my. Hmm. I'm not sure I could pick just one poet. There are so many who are good in such different ways for such different reasons. Byron is definitely up there, not just for the content of his poetry but for his incredible mastery of form. Look at something like
Don Juan, where he manages to write this incredibly long epic poem, hundreds and hundreds of pages, and all of it is in these Italian iambic pentameter octaves,
abababcc, which ought to sound so sing-songy and stupid in English,
abababcc, but he makes it work so brilliantly and tells this amazing story. To have that kind of mastery over the English language is just incredible to me. How does he do that?
My favorite poem of the past few months, though:
"Berryman"
W.S. Merwin
I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war
don't lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you're older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity
just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice
he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally
it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop
he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England
as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry
he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write