"This is just to say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were

probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me, they were delicious: so sweet and so cold"

Este bilhete é só para lhe dizer que comi as ameixas que estavam na geladeira e que
provavelmente você estava guardando para o café da manhã. Desculpe-me, elas estavam
deliciosas: tão doces e geladas (Trad. de Rosemary Arrojo, 1985)

This is just to say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold (1932)

From Paterson, book V (1958)

[…]
you cannot be
an artist
by mere ineptitude
The dream
is in pursuit
The neat figures of
Paul Klee

fill the canvas

but that
is not the work
of a child .
the cure began, perhaps
with the abstraction
 […]

Dürer
with his Melancholy
was aware of it—
the shattered masonry. Leonardo
saw it,
the obsession,
and ridiculed it
in La Gioconda.
Bosch’s
congeries of tortured souls and devils
who prey on them
fish
swallowing
their own entrails
Freud
Picasso
Juan Gris.
A letter from a friend
saying:
For the last
three nights
I have slept like a baby

[…]

(Q. Mr. Williams, can you tell me, simply, what poetry is?

A.Well . . . I would say that poetry is language charged with emotion.

It’s words, rhythmically organized . . .
A poem is a complete little universe. It exists separately. Any poem that has
worth expresses the whole life of the poet. It gives a view of what the poet is.

Q. … here’s part of a poem you yourself have written: “2 partridges/2 mallard

ducks/a Dungeness crab/24 hours out/of the Pacific/and 2 live-
frozen/trout/from Denmark . . .” Now, that sounds just like a fashionable
grocery list!
 A. It is a fashionable grocery list.

Q. Well — is it poetry?

A. We poets have to talk in a language which is not English. (…) Rhythmically

it’s organized as a sample of the American idiom. It has as much originality as
jazz. If you say “2 partridges, 2 mallard ducks, a Dungeness crab” — if you
treat that rhythmically, ignoring the practical sense it forms a jagged pattern.
It is, to my mind, poetry.
Anything is good material for poetry. Anything. I’ve said it time and time
again.

Q. Aren’t we supposed to understand it?

A. There is a difference of poetry and the sense.

Sometimes modern poets ignore sense completely. That’s what makes some
of the difficulty . . .

Q. But shouldn’t a word mean something when you see it?

A. In prose, an English word means what it says.

In poetry, you’re listening to two things: you’re listening to the sense, the
common sense of what it says.
But it says more.

LANDSCAPE WITH THE FALL OF ICARUS

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing

his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was

awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea

concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed

this was
Icarus drowning (From “Pictures of Brueghel”, 1960)
Carl Andre. Conquest display. 1965
FOLLIES: A LITTLE SPARTAN GUIDE TO THE NATIONAL TRUST

- Language
- Wit
- Scholarship: architecture
- Scholarship: literature
- Scholarship: art
- Concern for our literary heritage
- Appreciation of culture (Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1987)

DETACHED SENTENCES ON CONCRETE POETRY

Concrete poetry is not a visual but a silent poetry.
Concrete poetry was considered childish because it was seen and not
heard.
The Muse of concrete poetry reversed Mnemosyne’s gift; depriving
the poet of song, she gave him sweet eyesight.
A visual poet has to mind his ‘Ps and Qs’. (Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1964-1972)