Raymond Oliver: Five Poems

DISCOURSE ON METHOD

Not to write poems, but to state, 
Like truth, the figures of my thought,
The icons that illuminate
My book of hours; to define, 
With candid artifice, each line,
Each tangent, till what I have wrought
Stands clear; to fix in words my essence,
Which is the gist of all I know,
Against the subtle deliquescence
Of  time -- I have no more to show.
There are the motives of my soul,
The parts, to which conforms the whole.


METER AS DECORUM

Gone is the tact
Of former time.
Not 'strong' but slack,
The poet's line
No longer holds
Experience,
Which -- subtle, old,
Of power immense --
Now bends his forms
At its own pleasure.
We have no norm;
The pulse that measures
Civilization
Is wild, erratic --
As a heart-patient
Might seem ecstatic.


LATE AFTERNOON TEA

This tea, neither too weak, nor strong with leaves
To etch my teeth, not hot like licking thorns,
Recalls the attentive calm that one achieves
When purged of such desires as Plato scorns.

Chaste, it preserves an elemental poise,
Skirting extremes of water, earth, and fire
As music moves between silence and noise.
I drink.  My dissonant thoughts become a choir.


SKIPPING STONES ON A LAKE

The penny-slim
stone that spins
from his arched in-
dex finger skips
lightly in lit-
tle bumps, dip-
ping elastically
as far as we
think we can see --
then comes to rest,
sinking at last.



THE LAST JUDGMENT

Medieval sculptors knew,
Better than marxists, what to do
With the exploiting upper classes:
You carve them naked into stone,
With fiends that strip them to the bone
While shoving skewers up their asses.
Torture them richly and with skill.
And let them pay the bill.



--Raymond Oliver,
from Entries,
David R. Godine: Boston,
1982.

Prof. Raymond Oliver was one of the formative influences of my academic life.  He taught me how to read poetry, frankly.  He caught me up when I was wandering beside that particular path, set me on my way with maps and tools, and wherever I have wandered since that time, I still depend on those maps and those tools.

I still treasure "The English Lyric" (or "The Short Poem in English," I misremember the title, but not the content), back in 1980, I believe, in which you assigned and the students read as many "short" poems as humanly possible from the medieval period to Eliot and Auden in ten weeks.  That was a crash course in the British tradition, and I put "short" thus, for "The Rape of the Lock" and "Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard", among others, would not normally be considered less than long.   I'm not complaining now, and I didn't then; I'm happy you put so much before us and expected us to read and read and think and read some more.  Tools and maps, as I say.

I'm grateful for the Beowulf course, and others beyond those two I've named.

Thank you, sir.