04/23/2000

By Tom Mayo

POETRY

Poets love to write about poetry. Perhaps it's a way of dealing with the blank page of paper when the Muse is on shore leave, or an attempt to generate some income to supplement the often meager sales of poetry collections. Or it may simply be that poets love to write about poetry.

Some of their more evocative phrases are spot-welded in the lines that follow. I have appropriated, in letter or in spirit, from some of the best. (Hint: The third stanza starts with A.E. Housman and ends with Emily Dickinson.)

A poem is
a made thing, a machine
made out of words,
a capsule where
we wrap up our
punishable secrets, a
well-wrought urn.
A muscular and composed thing,
a poem should not mean
but be

the supreme fiction, madam -
imaginary gardens with
real toads in them,
conceived and composed in the soul -
a pseudo-person, centaur,
beguiling and seductive
while being, at the same time,
elusive
stored magic

I could no more define poetry
than a terrier can define a rat,
but we both recognize the object
by the symptoms which it provokes in us:
a poem makes my whole body so cold
no fire can ever warm me, I feel
physically as if the top
of my head were taken off

the breath of all knowledge, mere air
these words, but delicious to hear:
a voicing, a calling forth,
a place for the genuine, not an art
but a way of thinking, the poem
begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

soul-making activity, a walk,
criticism of life
confession of faith,
a hand, a hook, a prayer,
an escape from anxiety,
life-cherishing force:
soul in action

a river:
last will and testament
salvaged from the shipwreck,
sealed in a bottle, and cast
out on the waters;
fires for the cold,
ropes let down to the lost,
something as necessary as
bread in the pockets of the hungry

. . . a meteor

an act of language
a verbal icon:
what a bookstore puts
in the section of that name

If you want to know which poets match with which phrases, you can drop me a line at tmayo@mail.smu.edu. Meanwhile, enjoy what is left of National Poetry Month!

Tom Mayo, poetry-lover and associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University, teaches "Law, Literature & Medicine" at the law school and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.