Howard Nemerov

As part of my MA I'm taking a course in twentieth century American poetry and in my reading chanced upon this poem. I've always been aware of Nemerov, but wouldn't have considered myself a fan before now, but after finding this I'm voraciously eating him up. I love the trope of the ars poetica and more specifically fiction/poetry that deals in the acts/processes/languages of writing; this poem's foray into language is incredibly interesting, tightly phrased, and the image of the skaters manages to be both lightly ephemeral and paradoxically eternal.


Writing
The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice. Being intelligible,
these winding ways with their audacities
and delicate hesitations, they become
miraculous, so intimately, out there
at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world
and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
balance against great skeletons of stars
exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
by echo alone. Still, the point of style
is character. The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger's to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the 'Slender Gold.' A nervous man
writers nervously of a nervous world, and so on.

Miraculous. It is as thought the world
were a great writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing: continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.

--Howard Nemerov