The Noble Prize, yes, Noble
This has been Nobel Prize week in Sweden. I don’t know what to compare it to. As big as Christmas, Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July…The entire week is taken up on radio and television with Nobel. One learns about and from the prize winners inside and out. They’re interviewed constantly. They have a wonderful television seminar where they’re asked everything and give their points of view about everything. These are ordinary, yet great, great men. Men with matchless focus, peerless perseverance. Stick-to-it-ness that out does stick-to-it-ness. 30 years, 40 years they wait – and work. Bless them.
In December 2001 I wrote the following:
The Noble Prize
Somewhere exists a noble prize –
An all-eternal prize:
A special type
Without the hype,
Where thought and motive –
Tripped from mind to fingertip,
From pencil scratch and paperclip,
Bind up the un-read whole.
A noble prize
For those who never published.
Those open-pipe, sagacious fools
Who, being tools,
Kept at one thing
By rolling out the scroll
To lengths
Immeasurably long;
Withdrawing ego-hand control,
And finding substance in a song
That never reached a critic’s blows,
But sensing something there that knows
Endeavor’s beauty
And rewards it.
The Noble Prize 12 10.2001
In 2015 I tinkered it to this:
The Noble Prize #2
Somewhere exists a noble prize.
An all-eternal, special type
Without the hype,
Where thought and motive tripped
From mind and fingertip,
To pencil scratch and paperclip,
Bind the un-read whole.
A noble prize
For those
Who, never published,
Open-piped, sagacious fools
Becoming tools, keep at one thing
By rolling out a scroll
To lengths immeasurably long,
Withdrawing ego-hand control,
Find substance in a song
That never reach a critic’s blows, (or nose or rose)
But sensing something there that knows
The beauty of endeavor
Reimbursing time.
The Noble Prize 12 10.2001/revised 10.12.2015
The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative; The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative, II;
Arlene Corwin
Arlene Corwin Poetry 