Dear Mr. Frost:
Looking back on what
You once said
About writing free
Verse, I know it’s really far-
Fetched but for the sake
Of this poem let’s say you were
Still alive—I bet you’d have
A field day with this flighty
Pesky little critter
Of mine, more than likely
Running it to the ground
Like some frenzied color-
Blind lepidopterist tra-la-la
Traversing a pied meadow,
Sporting a mean nonexistent net.
I love this one, Vassilis. As I've loved so many others over the past months during which I was too busy to express gratitude. I remember an interview with Russell Edson in which he was confronted with Frost's "tennis with a net down" chestnut and then asked, "What does this say about prose poetry?" To which Edson answered, "Prose poetry is like playing tennis with your pants down." Hah! For silliness, the "net down" line is matched only by Williams's "a poem is a machine made of words." No. Poems are neither games nor machines. They are utterances of one or more of the little gods ... you know, as William Stafford said somewhere, "The little god who speaks only to me." Yours is a powerful one, deceptively so. Which is why you write such good poems!
ReplyDeleteBy the way, are you claiming in the last four lines that Nabokov was color-blind?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/science/01butterfly.html
ReplyDeleteJoseph—
No, no—Vladimir was certainly not color-blind—in fact, his sight was so fantastically good he could envisage blue butterflies flying in droves from Asia to the New World millions of years ago but I’m betting you already knew that, right?
Pronouncements such as the good doctor’s and Mr. Frost’s respectively have always left me feeling a bit uneasy about the nature of my writing, which is why I feel much closer to what you and Bill Stafford say about poems. Anyway, this is just a roundabout way of saying how much I appreciate your checking into this blog now and then and reminding me there’s actually someone out there who’s reading what I write and for that I thank you once again
Yes to both of yourf!
ReplyDeleteGood to see you here too, John!
ReplyDelete