Your invitation comes on a postcard with breakfast.
What use is poetry? ….
We have poetry
So we do not die of history.
– Meena Alexander
I like poems you can tack all over with a hammer and there are no hollow places. – John Ashbery
An Invitation to Poetry
Come on in. Jump!
You can do it. It belongs to you too.
Paddle, splash about, swim, dive, surf the swan’s way.
Reach and grasp and grab and seize
Or stand about, trousers rolled, toes curled in the sand, water lapping your knees.
The choice is yours.
Start – stick your toe in.
Permission to Play
It is delivered by an attendant lord in a ruffled collar
Permission to play.
Language is what we humans do.
At your own pace. In your own way.
Mute dialogues shunning shower or let the thunder mutter
In petal-fall just Spring or Unleaving
– Wait! – That’s not a word…is it?
It is now.
In fair seed-time? Or the sere and yellow leaf – dig in and drink to the lees.
Stay in the shallows. Dive in the deep.
Lurk in the shade of the willows or
Stretch out on the sand, and sleep.
Perchance to dream ….
And take your waking slow.
The Invitation
Comes on golden platter, deckle-edged, torn from the bottom of the sports page.
A whisper in the dark. The bugle call. The whistle…and over the top.
Dabble about. Dropout for tea. Drink the beaded bubbles. Or swirl the glass and sip.
Come for the hors d’oeuvres. Stay for the feast.
The envelope is very interesting.
From cradle to nuts and soup to grave
It’s not rocket surgery.
Mix your metaphors. Play. Make words dance and hop, go on stilts, skip about and lose their footing.
Skim them over the water. Drop them down the well.
Take a bite. And then another. Try something exotic and savor the strange and ineffable.
Start with a child-rhyme –
Julius Caesar,
Silly old geezer.
Squashed his wife with a lemon squeezer.
Stay with the bread and butter until you crave for more.
Enter the spear-din of words or eavesdrop at the door.
But don’t miss out – don’t get delayed.
The water is fine. The table is laid.
Sit on the mead-bench or stand in the hall
Dig in and get a taste of it all.
Choose wind like a whetted knife –
Edwaert Collier (c.1640–c.1707)
You place the invitation in your letter rack.
Or a beaker full of the warm south.
Drink the horn-stream of the gods.
Or coffee spoon the measures to your mouth.
You choose.
Slay the old shadow-stalker of doubt,
That maims the mind from within and without
Get with the program, go at it full-bored
Ascend the treasure-seat, claim your word-hoard.
Perch on celestial chimney pots –
Or strive to seek to find
Many tower’d Camelots.
The straight and narrow road
Winds uphill all the way
Down to a sunless sea
Words dance like raindrops in the sun
On the wings of a shark’s tooth
And I promise –
You will not drown.
It will not make you fat.
Something quite bizarre – a bird on skates wearing a tin hat and carrying a sealed letter in its beak. Is it for you?
With gratitude for all the poets and artists who help make our lives worth living.
And because poetry should not be some kind of competition for clever-clogs, I’m listing the poets from whom I borrowed something or somehow refer to in the doggerel above. I may have missed some, as poetry is like that – it gets in your head and sometimes you make it yours and think you made it up!
- Line 5: T.S.Eliot
- 11: William Wordsworth, John Clare, T.S.Eliot
- 12 e.e. cummings, Gerard Manley Hopkins
- 15 Wordsworth, Shakespeare, John Keats
- 19 William Shakespeare
- 20 Theodore Roethke
- 23 John Keats
- 35 Beowulf
- 40 John Masefield
- 41 John Keats
- 42 Beowulf
- 43 T.S.Eliot
- 49 John Masefield
- 50 Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- 51 Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- 52 John Bunyan
- 53 Christina Rosetti
- 54 Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I can write them at will – meh. But if there is a muse, wow. I have no say in the matter. If it takes all night, so be it.
Cath
Ashbery’s (poetic) definition can be applied to all great art.