Don Williams’ Blog

Don July 29th, 2009

LX Wordsworth wrote an endless poem in blank verse on” the growth of a poet’s mind.”  I shall attempt a more modest feat for a more distracted age: a blog, “Things which a Lifetime of Trying to Be a Poet has Taught Me.” 

            The next four entries together make up a larger work that let me take out some of my frustrations with what was happening to poetry in the late Twentieth Century—which can only be called the suicide of an art form.  It is hard now to remember that in my own lifetime there were living poets (Robert Frost, for example) that people actually cared about.  Try naming just one who is writing now. 

             OK, if you’re reading this blog you can name one.  Name another one!  How did this major cultural shift come about?  Read on–and visit the archives for the essay, “Poetry.” that we ran in an early edition of JOFP.

 ARS POETICA, A Musical Suite in Four Movements I:  Discursus Discordus (For a Choir of Contemporary Poets)  

We are Artists!  Thus, we cannot be

Bound to any false conformity

To Nature (or to Grammar, for that matter).

It is enough if we keep up the chatter!

For we are Artists!  Therefore, what we say

Has worth intrinsic.  Things are just that way.

So if our lines cannot be understood,

Well, we think that is all more to the good

Because by this they seem the more profound,

Whereby out reputations do abound.

Don’t worry whether what we say is true,

It’s more important that it just be new!

Each emotion in our hearts that flowers

Makes worthwhile reading just because it’s ours.

Edification, timeless truth, insight,

Whether our sentiments are wrong or right—

We can’t be bothered by such bourgeois fetters,

For we are Great Souls—Artists—Men of Letters!

Dump the raw emotion on the sheet

To make a lyric poem that can’t be beat.

Look, look:  We have no tune, and yet we sing!

Oh, come and hear.  It is the latest thing.

Donald T. Williams, PhD

• Art/Aesthetics , Poetry
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