To a Tree

Oh, tree outside my window, we are kin,
    For you ask nothing of a friend but this:
To lean against the window and peer in
    And watch me move about! Sufficient bliss

For me, who stand behind its framework stout,
    Full of my tiny tragedies and grotesque grieves,
To lean against the window and peer out,
    Admiring infinites’mal leaves.

– Elizabeth Bishop (written in 1927, when she was 16) (Collected, “Poems Written In Youth,” 212)

Cézanne and Zola

At thirteen they were known as the inseparables.
“Opposites by nature,” wrote Zola, ” we became
united forever in the midst of the brutal gang
of dreadful dunces who beat us.” Inconsolable
with Zola in Paris, Cézanne wrote, “I no longer
recognize myself. I am heavy, stupid, and slow.”
Despite many visits, their disagreements overthrew
their intimacy and they grew apart. “A dreamer,”
was how Zola described his friend, “a failure
of genius.” And in a novel he wrote how Cézanne
“had lost his footing and drowned in the dazzling
folly of art.” Cézanne replied with sixteen years
of silence, yet when Zola died he fled to his room.
“All day,” a friend said, “we heard the sound of weeping.”

– Stephen Dobyns, “Cézanne and Zola” (via essay in Hunting Men, 2.139)

“…Schizophrenic poetry
Tends to be loose, disjointed, uncritical of itself, in some ways
Like what is best in our modern practice of the poetic art
But unlike it in others, in its lack of concern
For intensity and nuance. A few great poems
By poets supposed to be “mad” are of course known to us all,
Such as those of Christopher Smart, but I wonder how crazy they were,
These poets who wrote such contraptions of exigent art?
As for Blake’s being “crazy,” that seems to me very unlikely.
But what about Wordsworth? Not crazy, I mean, but what about his later work, boring
To the point of inanity, almost, and the destructive “corrections” he made
To his Prelude, as it nosed along, through the shallows of art?
He was really terrible after he wrote the “Ode:
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” for the most part,
Or so it seems to me. Walt Whitman’s “corrections,” too, of the Leaves of Grass,
And especially “Song of Myself,” are almost always terrible. ”

– Kenneth Koch, The Art of Poetry, continued

“To write a poem, perfect physical condition
is desirable but not necessary. Keats wrote
in poor health, as did D.H. Lawrence. A combination
of disease and old age is an impediment to writing, but
Neither is, alone, unless there is arteriosclerosis–that is,
Hardening of the arteries–but that we shall count as a disease
Accompanying old age and therefore a negative condition.
Mental health is certainly not a necessity for the
Creation of poetic beauty, but a degree of it
Would seem to be, except in rare cases…”

– Kenneth Koch, “The Art of Poetry,” which I have in his collection, The Art of Poetry. It has some essays, but also parodies, interviews, and long poems with discursive subjects. I read this for the first time last year, at my advisor’s suggestion, and loved it. I’m going to, if I keep to it, post pieces of “The Art of Poetry” up here till I finish it.

“In nature there is nothing melancholy.
–But some night-wandering Man, whose heart was pierc’d
With the remembrance of a grievous wrong,
Or slow distemper or neglected love,
(And so, poor Wretch! fill’d all things with himself
And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale
Of his own sorrows) he and such as he
First nam’d these notes a melancholy strain;
And many a poet echoes the conceit,
Poet, who hath been building up the rhyme
When he had better far have stretch’d his limbs
Beside a brook in mossy forest-dell
By sun or moonlight, to the influxes
Of shapes and sounds and shifting elements
Surrendering his whole spirit, of his song
And his fame forgetful! so his fame
Should share in nature’s immortality,
A venerable thing! and so his song
should make all nature lovelier, and itself
Be lov’d, like nature! –But ’twill not be so…”

– from “The Nightingale,” S.T. Coleridge, in Lyrical Ballads. He, and such as he. Yep.