Poetic Writers

             Seeing Off Master T'an

             By Meng Chiao (751-814)

A poet suffers making poems —
Better to waste your efforts trying to fly!
My whole life, a spirit of useless squawking,
Bare, leafless twigs hang from cold branches,
Cast off as though a tiny ball of spittle.
Step after step you beg
For scrap after scrap of clothing.
Those who have relied on poetry for a living
Since ancient times have never gotten fat.
This old man, hungry from poetry, is not bitter,
But your suffering tears fall like rain.
— Stephen Owen (tr.), in Sunflower Splendor,
Wu-xchi Liu/Irving Lo (eds.), pp. 158-159.

                     Call to Arms
           By Lu Hsün (1881-1936)

Take up the pen: fall into the net of law;
Resist the times: offend popular sentiments.
Accumulated abuse can dissolve the bones,
And so, one gives voice to the empty page.
— William R. Schultz (tr.), in Ibid., p. 508.

Gertrude Stein on Ezra Pound. "A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not."
— The Almanac of American Letters, Randy F. Nelson (ed.), p. 166.

Richard Wilbur on Edgar Allan Poe. "Poe's mind may have been a strange one; yet all minds are alike in their general structure; therefore, we can understand him, and I think he will have something to say to us as long as there is civil war in the palaces of men's minds."
— Ibid., p. 171.

Tennessee Williams on William Faulkner. "I felt a terrible torment in the man. He always kept his eyes down. We tried to carry on a conversation but he would never participation. Finally he lifted his eyes once to a direct question from me, and the look in his eyes was so terrible, so sad, that I began to cry."
— Ibid., pp. 171-172.

John Dos Passos. "If there is a special hell for writers, it would be the forced contemplation of their own works.
— Ibid., p. 173.

William Faulkner. "The only environment the artist needs is whatever peace, whatever solitude, and whatever pleasure he can get at not too high a cost."
— Ibid., p. 173.

Benjamin Franklin. "Write with the learned. Pronounce with the vulgar."
— Ibid., p. 173.

            On Love
In that little ugly hut
I'd like to burn down,
on a spread of rotten bedding
fit for the trash,
entwined in those
ugliest of ugly arms —
may they break! —
you're sleeping, I suppose —
and because of you every hour
of the madder-red day,
all through the night
black as leopard-flower seeds,
till the floor beneath me
creaks and groans,
I lie tormented!
                  ENVOY
It is I poor thing,
who burns up
my own heart that makes me
long for you so!
— From "Six Anonymous Choka," in From the Country of Eight Islands,
Hiroaki Sato/Burton Watson (trs. & eds.), pp. 77-78.

Years to come
will there be those
who wish they'd known me too? —
like me, letting their mind
dwell on the past

While I gaze far off,
thinking on and on
about this world of ours,
a white cloud vanishes
in the empty sky
— Saigyo (1118-1190), from "Sixty-Four Tanka," in Ibid., p. 168.