Friday, March 30, 2007




Wystan Hugh Auden on creative writing. This is worth reading only because of the line "Happy the lot of the pure mathematician." How does that line scan? Auden has at various times been a favorite windbag of mine, only because you have to know what not to aspire to as well.

Lumpy Sincerity

Write sky poems in an empty room
about psychological pneumonia.
Friends come and friends go
singular dance of the seasons, remain.

What common emotions, individual struggles
of beads and oceans and secret rivers.
My theme is perfect and without center
its beauty is its movement, glistening.

What music and pictures, of rocks
my approach is crumbling, splashes and
rites beneath shark harmony
your shoulders are a thin mystery.

Swimming in facts, afternoons flexible
exaggerations gallop as religious as Rome.
Hear them whisper, cats know—
musculature of the present flexing.