[New-Poetry] more Corn

[JforJames at aol.com]

(FYI...this book from which these are quoted has aphorisms related to  many 
themes. I selected those most appropriate to poetry and the artist's  lot.) 
-- 
Meter (as well as strophic form) is inseparable from the ingenuity of  
invention and as such one of the manifestations of irrationality in  poetry 
The writer must be a polyglot—the best way to learn how all language is  
foreign, especially one’s own. 
Literature is in permanent competition with its interpretations. Since  the 
70s, it could be said to have lost—often because it ‘threw’ the  fight. 
Older poets may well say, paraphrasing Villars de L’Isle Adam, “Feel? But  
we have our poems to do that for us?” 
Aphorisms are fictions, otherwise they would be no more striking  than the 
morning paper. In fact, the best aphorisms are poems or novels in  capsule form. 
Publishing poems written to a lover: isn’t it like those Valentine  messages 
painted with a spray can on highway overpasses, read by all who drive  toward 
them, without knowing the writer or the addressee, and yet, under the  spell 
of identification, perhaps reminded of their own emotions? 
There’s no reason criticism can’t amount to poetry in prose—so long as  the 
critic finds the right words. Those able to do that, though, usually  consider 
it enough to be authors of poems written in lines. 
Goethe said poetry is what survives translation; for Frost it was what  doesn’
t. Well? Although that celebrated piping and drumming of particular lines  
may be lost, along with the bright mist of connotation, I lean toward Goethe, if 
 what we mean by poetry is original thought and deep feeling. 
Life wounds everyone. Besides blood, however, the artist sheds  light. 
The more one knows, the more connections abound. So then  omniscience would 
perceive all parts of reality as coincident with all other  parts. By 
establishing one or two of those coincidences, the artist gives the  sensation of 
omniscience.   
Poetry is speech that counts. 
A great poem is a lamp by which we read other poems past and  present. 
Edgar Allan Poe: Romance, necrophilia, necromancy. 
They do parodies of W’s writings; but she doesn’t do parodies of  theirs. 
When authors are “unearthly,” they should still try not to be from  another 
planet. 
Feelings are always enhanced by the sensation that they are being shared  and 
complemented by a larger community: the of the solo instrument  concerto. 
Poets, as public readers and interviewees, are asked to become the disc  
jockey and also the graduate student of themselves. 
Metaphor sleeps around. 
Try as we might, some “impurities” will remain in the poem’s final draft;  
but they are like tea leafs at the bottom of the cup, recalling the flavor’s  
origin, and, could we read them, telling us our fortune. 
—Alfred  Corn, The Pith Helmet, Cummington Press,  1992



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