Robert Penn Warren (1905 – 1989)
American poet, novelist, and literary critic, and one of the founders of New Criticism.
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
More and more Emerson recedes grandly into history, as the future he predicted becomes a past.
I cannot recall what I started to tell you, but at least
I can say how night-long I have lain under the stars and
Heard mountains moan in their sleep. By daylight,
They remember nothing, and go about their lawful occasions
Of not going anywhere except in slow disintegration. At night
They remember, however, that there is something they cannot remember.
So moan.Their's is the perfected pain of conscience that
Of forgetting the crime, and I hope you have not suffered it. I have.
I longed to know the world's name.
In silence the heart raves. It utters words
Meaningless, that never had
A meaning. I was ten, skinny, red-headed,
Freckled. In a big black Buick,
Driven by a big grown boy, with a necktie, she sat
In front of the drugstore, sipping something
Through a straw. There is nothing like
Beauty. It stops your heart.It
Thickens your blood. It stops your breath. It
Makes you feel dirty. You need a hot bath.
I leaned against a telephone pole, and watched.
I thought I would die if she saw me.
Such fable ours! However sweet,
That earlier hope had, if fulfilled,
Been but child's pap and toothless meat
— And meaning blunt and deed unwilled,
And we but motes that dance in light
And in such light gleam like the core
Of light, but lightless, are in right
Blind dust that fouls the unswept floor
For, no: not faith by fable lives,
But from the faith the fable springs
— It never is the song that gives
Tongue life, it is the tongue that sings;
And sings the song. Then, let the act
Speak, it is the unbetrayable
Command, if music, let the fact
Make music's motion; us, the fable
Accept these images for what they are —
Out of the past a fragile element
Of substance into accident.
I would speak honestly and of a full heart;
I would speak surely for the tale is short,
And the soul's remorseless catalogue
Assumes its quick and piteous sum.
How could I exist in the same world with that brightness?
Two years later she smiled at me. She
Named my name. I thought I would wake up dead.
Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They’re inexpensive and easy to procure.
Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
But to poetry — You have to be willing to waste time. When you start a poem, stay with it and suffer through it and just think about nothing, not even the poem. Just be there. It's more of a prayerful state than writing the novels is. A lot of the novel is in doing good works, as it were, not praying. And the prayerful state is just being passive with it, mumbling, being around there, lying on the grass, going swimming, you see. Even getting drunk. Get drunk prayerfully, though.
What glass unwinking gives our trust
Its image back, what echo names
The names we hurl at namelessness?
Most writers are trying to find what they think or feel. . . not simply working from the given, but toward the given, saying the unsayable and steadily asking, "What do I really feel about this?"
The urge to write poetry is like having an itch. When the itch becomes annoying enough, you scratch it.
If anybody's going to be a writer, he's got to be able to say, "This has got to come first, to write has to come first." That is, if you have a job, you have to scant your job a little bit. You can't be an industrious apprentice if you're going to be a poet. You've got to pretend to be an industrious apprentice but really steal time from the boss. Or from your wife, or somebody, you see. The time's got to come from somewhere. And also this passivity, this "waitingness," has to be achieved some way. It can't be treated as a job. It's got to be treated as a non-job or an anti-job.
I don’t expect you’ll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.