Matthew Buckley Smith

November 13, 2023

“Ars Ecphrastica” by Matthew Buckley SmithPosted by

Matthew Buckley Smith

ARS ECPHRASTICA

for C.

Although your fingers and my eyes agree,
It is unheard of, Cameron, what you see—
 
Describing scenes of color, form, and light
Which you perceive by any means but sight.
 
We cannot know the god’s unheard-of head,
Protested Rilke, when he should have said
 
Unseen, because we hear of it from him
In carnal terms, becoming of a hymn
 
To any of those bad old gods, the kind
That loved man’s form but not his living mind,
 
Delighting in some tyrant’s blinding wrath,
Then disappearing in the aftermath.
 
 
 

Prompt: “I wrote this in response to one of two suggestions made to my writing group. I had been reading a lot of Horace, and at two different sessions I brought up the idea of imitating something he did in his odes. In one, I proposed that we each write a poem that argues with an existing poem. In another, I proposed that we each write a poem addressed to a friend. I cannot remember which prompt inspired this poem.”

—from Rattle #81, Fall 2023
Tribute to Prompt Poems

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Matthew Buckley Smith: “Every week, I meet for an hour by Zoom with two women I got to know through a poetry anthology we were all in. One of us supplies a prompt, and then we write for an hour in response. Sometimes the prompt is an image. Sometimes it’s a line from a book we’re reading. Sometimes it’s an idea drawn from an existing poem. I save the results of my efforts in a file that I examine some months later. Roughly one draft in ten is worth revising.” (web)

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January 22, 2018

“Undergrads” by Matthew Buckley SmithPosted by

Matthew Buckley Smith

UNDERGRADS

The place we lived was only an idea,
Nothing to do with the failed cotton mill town
Where a record shop, some bars, and a pizzeria
Were all we ever cared to call our own.

From nightmares of a happy life with kids
We’d wake in boozy sweat to find the floor
Still cobbled with bottle caps and take-out lids,
Our twenties crumpled safely in a drawer,

Unspent like all the hours ahead that night
We met each other in the common room
And found somehow without the help of light
Our way across the river by the time

Dawn spilled down from the campus to the banks
We’d come to, single, sobered-up again,
To see the morning glories give their thanks
For things we had, and hardly noticed, then.

—from Rattle #57, Fall 2017

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Matthew Buckley Smith: “The more time I spend with poetry, the less certain I am of anything I say about it. I’ll admit that as a reader I tend to favor clarity over innovation, beauty over authenticity, and feeling over moral rectitude. As a writer I just try to write poems I would want to read. But even these inclinations I grow daily less sure of.”

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