Sonnet About
Ovid Written on a Quiet Day
My own
wanting to do all these things
is my talent
in the art of love:
only the art
is taught
but not the
talent.
So the
electronic language-turning mechanisms
being
programmed to improve themselves by work
will never
translate anything because they want to
but the
wanting is the basic matter of all art.
Mixed as it
might be with the stuff of speech,
with sounds
or clays or colors,
anything you
like and as you like it
to make the
basic matter of any given art
as taken in
particular,
as apart from
all the other arts.
Ilya Gutner
Ilya Gutner was born in the Soviet Union
in Moscow and grew up in New York. Was for a time a PhD student in Slavic
Studies at Brown but that soon ceased to be an option. Studies philosophy now
in Shanghai, China. Google services make not of one small set of things
published with the Ottoman Estate under a collective title, Poem about how to
live; something quite childish for Boston University's Clarion magazine; and a
long silence gathering up things to say since then.
Tags:
Poetry