lunch poem(s)

Doing Poetry

 

Poem, you sonofabitch, it's bad enough

that I embarass myself working so hard

to get it right even a little,

and that little grudging and awkward.

But it's afterwards I resent, when

the sweet sure should hold me like

a trout in the bright summer stream.

There should be at least briefly

access to your glamour and tenderness.

But there's always this same old

dissatisfaction instead.

 

Jack Gilbert

from Refusing Heaven

 

 

Jack Gilbert

 

Take a hammer to the amphora of soft Euphrates clay

and it will fracture meticulously there, and there,

and there, the way a sentence yields at the invisible

seams and faults of grammar's fluid syntactic

tectonics. Take a chisel to the mountainside--basalt,

gabbro, porphyry--and, well, what did you expect.

 

Campbell McGrath

from The New American Poets, edited by Michael Collier