[New-Poetry] A short essay on poetry

[David Graham]

A Short Essay On Poetry

A poet who observes his own poetry ends up, in spite of it, by  
finding nothing to observe, just as a man who pays too much attention  
to the way he walks, finds his legs walking off from under him.  
Nevertheless, poets must sometimes look at themselves in order to  
remember what they are risking. What I see as poetry is a sample of  
the human scene, its incurably acute melancholia redeemed only by  
affection. This sample of endurance is innocent and gay: the music of  
vowel and consonant is the happy-go-lucky echo of time itself.  
Without this music there is simply no poem. It borrows further gaiety  
by contrast with the burden it carries -- for this exquisite lilt,  
this dance of sound, must be married to a responsible intelligence  
before there can occur the poem. Naturally, they are one: meanings  
and music, metaphor and thought. In the course of poetry's career,  
perhaps new awarenesses discovered, really new awarenesses and not  
verbal combinations brought together in any old way. This rather  
unimportant novelty is sometimes a play of possibility and sometimes  
a genuinely new insight: like Tristram Shandy, they add something to  
this Fragment of Life.

-– David Schubert
(1941)

Blog:  The Best American Poetry.   10/18/08
http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/



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David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu

Home Page:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz

Poetry Library:
http://web.mac.com/drjazz/iWeb/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
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