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FURTHER READING
Poems about Poetry
Epistles, Book II, Ars Poetica
by Horace
Poetry as Insurgent Art [I am signaling you through the flames]
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
A Book Of Music
by Jack Spicer
A True Poem
by Lloyd Schwartz
Adam's Curse
by W. B. Yeats, read by James Wright
Always on the Train
by Ruth Stone
Ars Poetica
by Archibald MacLeish
Ars Poetica (cocoons)
by Dana Levin
Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry
by Howard Nemerov
Blue or Green
by James Galvin
Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks
by Jane Kenyon
Broadway
by Mark Doty
Diving into the Wreck
by Adrienne Rich, read by Anne Waldman
Eating Poetry
by Mark Strand
Endnote
by Hayden Carruth
Envoi
by William Meredith
Ground Swell
by Mark Jarman
How to Read a Poem: Beginner's Manual
by Pamela Spiro Wagner
If It All Went Up in Smoke
by George Oppen
Languages
by Carl Sandburg
O Black and Unknown Bards
by James Weldon Johnson
Poet's Work
by Lorine Niedecker
Poetry
by Marianne Moore
Poetry Is a Destructive Force
by Wallace Stevens
Prefix: Finding the measure
by Robert Kelly
Speech Alone
by Jean Follain
Take the I Out
by Sharon Olds
Teaching the Ape to Write Poems
by James Tate
The Art of Poetry [excerpt]
by Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
The Bear
by Galway Kinnell
The Composition of the Text
by Adriano Spatola
The Difference between a Child and a Poem
by Michael Blumenthal
The Indications [excerpt]
by Walt Whitman
The Poem as Mask
by Muriel Rukeyser
The Poems I Have Not Written
by John Brehm
The Uses of Poetry
by William Carlos Williams
This Bridge, Like Poetry, is Vertigo
by Marie Ponsot
What He Thought
by Heather McHugh
Why I Am Not a Painter
by Frank O'Hara
Workshop
by Billy Collins
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Arthur's Anthology of English Poetry

 
by Laurence Lerner

To be or not to be, that is the question
To justify the ways of God to men
There was a time when meadow grove and stream
The dropping of the daylight in the west
Otters below and moorhens on the top
Had fallen in Lyonesse about their Lord.

There was a time when moorhens on the top
To justify the daylight in the west,
To be or not to be about their Lord
Had fallen in Lyonesse from God to men;
Otters below and meadow grove and stream,
The dropping of the day, that is the question.

A time when Lyonesse and grove and stream
To be the daylight in the west on top 
When meadow otters fallen about their Lord
To justify the moorhens is the question
Or not to be the dropping God to men
There was below the ways that is a time.

To be in Lyonesse, that is the question
To justify the otters, is the question
The dropping of the meadows, is the question

I do not know the answer to the question

There was a time when moorhens in the west
There was a time when daylight on the top
There was a time when God was not a question

There was a time when poets

                         Then I came






From A.R.T.H.U.R. by Laurence Lerner. Copyright © 1974 by Laurence Levine. Reprinted by permission of the University of Massachusetts Press. All rights reserved.
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