Poets have
No Biographies.²
In every time & place
Ye may know the Poet’s face:
By the Shade or the Shining!³
There’s nothing in the world
For which a Poet will give up Writing.⁴
For such Happiness of being a Writer,
We are ready to endure poverty, disappointment,
And the dislike of all those around us.⁵
A blind horse trots up an icy ledge:
Such is a Poet.⁶
No Poet writes more than
One Poem—and it takes a Lifetime:⁷
Charged by Eternity to themselves at last,
The poets with the bare blade of their Minds!⁸
A Poet reaches out to join incalculable holdings,
To nourish unconventional Imaginative Possibilities …⁹
To be a Poet is to have a soul so quick to Discern
That no shade of Quality escapes it, and
So quick to Feel, that discernment is but
A hand playing with finely ordered variety
On the chords of Emotion.¹⁰
¹ Emily Dickinson, I Reckon When I Count
² Nicanor Parra tr. Miller Williams, Sentences
³ Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Earth and Her Praises
⁴ Paul Celan tr. John Felstiner, Letter to Relatives 1948
⁵ Anton Chekhov tr. Constance Garnett, The Sea-Gull
⁶ Kosen tr. Stryk & Ikemoto, A Blind Horse Trotting Up an Icy Ledge
⁷ John Berger, From A to X
⁸ Stéphanie Mallarmé tr. Richard Wilbur, The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe
⁹ Dana Gioia, Disappearing Ink
¹⁰ George Eliot, Middlemarch