Welcome, one and all, to the Poets Pub for a round of Poetics! I’m Dora from Dreams from a Pilgrimage and I’d like you to ponder with me just now that titular idiom which implies a permanence when words are set in stone that no other material seems to give. But . . .

. . . before we get started, a REMINDER:
This coming Saturday, February 17, from 10 A.M. to 11:30 A.M. (EST) is dVerse LIVE! and Sanaa will be hosting. This will be open to anyone who wants to listen or read their poem or someone’s poem or sharing of a poem that one likes. It does not have to be the poem shared during OLN this Thursday — it can be any poem that they have written or read. OLN will have an optional prompt as is our new custom.

Oh, the temptation! There you are, walking along, and suddenly, right there before you, a patch of newly paved sidewalk, the cement still pliable and soft. Soft enough to . . . WRITE ON! What do you do? What CAN you do? Your muse is screaming. And you? Well, you’re only HUMAN.

From the beginning of history and beyond, we’ve wanted to leave our mark on the world around us, to tell our stories, to point to our discoveries about life from the mundane to the sublime.

The earliest civilizations have left us clay or stone tablets of cuneiform, pictographs, and hieroglyphs recording such things as cattle counts or grain measures to a monarch’s edicts and laws to oracle inscriptions cryptically rendered. The not-so-cryptic and ubiquitously known Ten Commandments of the Torah and Old Testament were first written on tablets of stone around 1500 B.C.

Even after more portable skins and papyrus and scrolls of paper were in use, we still continued to write on stone so that the well-preserved walls of Pompeii (79 A.D.), for example, speak of the flourishing of graffiti in the ancient world.

I’m amazed, O wall, that you have not fallen in ruins, you who support the tediousness of so many writers.

epigram taken from a wall in Pompeii (Taylor and Baird, eds., Ancient Graffiti in Context (2010) qtd. in Smithsonian Magazine, 2010) (source)

The 2nd century A.D. “Song of Seikilos” is a seventeen-word poem which survives inscribed in six rows of elegant Greek uppercase letters on a cylindrical marble column.

An English rendering with the same number of syllables (i.e. an isosyllabic translation) is as follows:

While you live shine bright:
Don’t let sorrow you benight;
We don’t have life for long, my friend:
To everything Time demands an end.

trans. qtd. by Armand D’Angour in “The Song of Seikilos: a Musically Notated Ancient Greek Poem” (source)

Our gravestones promise us immortality, even if it is only our names that are recorded. Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein) learned her alphabet from visiting the graveyard where her mother lay, tracing the letters on the stone with her childish fingers. Her husband wrote a poem in which a “lone traveler” tells of a great king who had his visage carved, immortalizing in stone these words of invitation on its pedestal:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

“Ozymandias,” Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818) (source)

Indeed the irony is boundless as well.

The great medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri in the Inferno, walks with Virgil down the “savage way” to hell and comes upon these welcoming words “inscribed over an archway”:

THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE CITY OF WOE,
THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME THE WAY AMONG THE LOST.
JUSTICE MOVED MY MAKER ON HIGH.
DIVINE POWER MADE ME,
WISDOM SUPREME, AND PRIMAL LOVE.
BEFORE ME NOTHING WAS BUT THINGS ETERNAL,
AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY.
ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE . . .

Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy) – tr. Hollander – Cantica I – Canto iii (source)

Inscribed on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal entrance in New York harbor is Emma Lazarus’s Petrarchan sonnet, “The New Colossus” (1881) which most famously welcomes its immigrants and newcomers, especially Jews fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe, with the words:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

excerpt from “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus (source)

Poetry inscriptions written in many languages can be found on the walls of detention barracks on Angel Island where Asian immigrants entering the United States were often forced to stay. Where welcome was expected, these poems instead speak of their writers’ “frustration, fear, and anxiety.” (source)

All of which leads us to this feature of our human expression finding its way on to stone at Washington, D.C.’s Folger Shakespeare Library (which houses the world’s largest Shakespeare collection) and its grounds. After a multi-year renovation project, the Folger will re-open this summer and visitors will find a brand new poem by Rita Dove inscribed on a berm, a “continuous border of marble that wraps around the West garden walkway.” (source) The poem is intended as a welcoming gesture, a promising invitation prior to entering the Folger.

Dove says the challenges of writing a poem to be seen on a low wall are unique:

“To be inscribed in marble, it seems like the words can freeze into the stone. So, the idea is how to—for me—the idea was how do you warm up those words so that they seem to be speaking to you as opposed to either shouting at you or just resting there in peace?” Another challenge is that the poem is heard internally since it’s not meant to be spoken aloud: “And there’s so much that goes on in our interior lives that never reaches the surface, even as we walk into, say, the Folger Shakespeare Library, right? That I wanted to capture that moment when things begin to switch, when one becomes aware of one’s thoughts.” (source)

Clear your calendars. Pocket your notes.
Look up into the blue amplitudes,
sun lolling on his throne, watching clouds
scrawl past, content with going nowhere.
No chart can calibrate the hush that settles
just before the first cricket song rises;
no list will recall a garden’s embroidery,
its fringed pinks and reds, its humble hedges.
Every day is Too Much or Never Enough,
so stop fretting your worth and berating
the cosmos – step into a house where
the jumbled perfumes of our human potpourri
waft up from a single page.
You can feel the world stop, lean in, and listen
as your heart starts up again.

Rita Dove poem for the West Garden Entrance to the Folger; source text and reading here.

Our Poetics challenge is to write a poem, as Dove was commissioned to do, for a walled entrance that addresses and welcomes visitors into a space of your choosing.

As with Dove’s poem, this can be a location existing in physical reality (for the walkway to your home, backyard, neighborhood, woods) or in your metaphysical imagination (for a path leading to an apocalyptic or mythological landscape) or a vision of true love — tomorrow being Valentine’s Day. What if it were an invitation into your own heart to one who would love you?

Or maybe the poem on the walled entrance can address visitors to your favorite author or character’s world or a location as everyday as your office workplace or home workspace, or a place of leisure and relaxation. And here’s a thought: perhaps that visitor may only be you, and your poem is to welcome and reorient yourself into this space.

The poem must be about the length of Dove’s so that it can meet the requirements of such a wall construction and not outlast its reader/visitor’s attention. If necessary, give us a couple of lines prefacing the poem as to what type of space the poem is welcoming us into.

New to dVerse? Here’s how to join in:

• Write a poem in response to this challenge and post it on your blog.
• Link or tag this page in your blog post.
• Enter your name and a link directly to your poem by clicking Mr. Linky below and remember to check the little box to accept the use/privacy policy.
• You will find links to other poets and more will join, so please do check back later in order to read their poems.
• Read and comment on other poets’ work; we do so look forward to each other’s feedback, don’t we?!
• – and ENJOY!!

Note that Mr. Linky remains open till 1 PM (EST) this Thursday.