misc/poetry
Leonard Cohen,
Philip Larkin,
Fernando Pessoa,
Pablo Neruda,
Mark Doty,
Alex Gallo-Brown,
Robert Hass,
Matthew Zapruder,
Wendy Trevino
poems i like
[...] And, friends
It is rotten, to have had history pull you up and spit you
Out again, for a few good moments, for nothing more
Than debt and waged servitude, all the hours stolen for gas bills,
Their world not built for you, its monstrous incursions
Of spectacular boredom, the sheer misery of getting by,
The mob's grief with a pang, ad now without a mob.
And the pangs ring harder as our bones chill, waiting,
We drink 'til dawn and hope to find something in it,
This city is full of wolves where nothing is plenty for them to eat,
They pull apart the sinews of matter, on which we expend
Ourselves paid down in rent and double rent. It is
The exhaustion, a cloth pressed firmly round the escape pipe,
Troubled air smothering and poisonous, nausea & inertia,
As smoke fills your tear ducts and the tongue dusts,
Two twins holding each of your hands and nailing you
To the floor. And what way to get out when the escape is full
Of rats and the hatches are being smoked out
With putrescent black smoke, all the exits bolted shut.
their deaths happened long
Before. It happened in the minds of people who never saw
Them. It happened in the profit margins. It happened
In the laws. They died because money could be saved and made.
poem by Ben Okri on Grenfell
When you leave the museum
of contemporary art, opening
the doors to midday, you may need
a few minutes to reset context:
the bike shackled to the sign
is only a bike, the sign only a sign,
no small white exhibit labels.
Out here birds are nothing
but their crumb-begging selves,
shitting on cars and waking us
before our alarms. Cars are cars,
shit is shit. You walk by some café
where a woman sits alone unless
you count the two dachshunds
eating torn bits of French bread
she’s tossed under the table.
Aren’t the dogs perfectly
curated and aren’t the branches
like bicycle spokes, the noontime light
a playing card whirring between them?
As if sunlight as sunlight isn’t
art enough, as if trees need to be
more than themselves to deserve
attention, which is a kind of love.
You’re a stranger in this city,
finding your way to the hotel
where you’ll sleep only tonight,
though when you arrive,
you’ll text your husband,
I’m home. It’s more than enough:
the city as itself and you as you
inside it, and home as home,
etcetera, forever.
awww i like this
There are poems of not-knowing that are, for me, very connected to this and have the same quality. One of my favorite haiku is by Basho, who is a poet I think of as actually having many connections to Emily Dickinson. It’s a poem that takes the classic, almost cliché subject of the haiku, the middle high part of the autumn season—the phrase in Japanese is aki fukaki, usually translated “deep autumn” or “autumn deepens,” and there are many such poems: “deep autumn the leaves are falling . . .” “deep autumn even now the quinces . . . ,” deep autumn this and that; the poem of Basho’s on this subject goes:
Deep autumn—
my neighbor,
how does he live, I wonder?
Paraphrasing haiku, I know, is like explaining jokes; it’s a sort of hopeless enterprise. But what is deeply moving to me about this poem is the way it gets whatever it is in our bodies that groans with gorgeous and painful knowledge in the turning of the year. And it gets the feeling of separateness from other people that accompanies it. And the longing to be connected back to them. Or an awakened curiosity about them, as if, waking to the fact that there are other people with other lives, the speaker in the poem has a sudden taste of his own self, of his having one and being one. Both these poems borrow on long religious traditions. One might not think so, but to speak of “deep autumn” in the Buddhist tradition is to speak of a fundamental idea about nature, that it is impermanent and contingent, as much as talking about light recalls the Gospel of John for a Christian—both of them are poems of essential loneliness that have in them a long experience of religion and a longing for it and a deep separateness from it. And what they have pledged themselves to, as a representation of spirituality, is the work of imagination.
In talking about this with Judith, I was able to quote a haiku that I love by the nineteenth-century poet Kobayashi Issa, which goes like this—seventeen syllables in the Japanese:
The man pulling radishes
Pointed my way
With a radish.
Can you imagine the situation? The narrator of the poem is hiking along a road. He stops and asks for directions. And the fellow working in the field waves his radish—it’s a daikon, one of those long skinny Japanese radishes—and says, “Oh, it’s about four miles down the road on the left.” That’s my image of myself teaching poetry: I was the guy with the radish.
I was a worker once.
Lent my labor to
the appetites of mass.
Like a caged animal,
my master said,
beautiful, self-contained.
Only once was I asked to sacrifice
the fingers of my left land,
which I gave willingly
and mostly without regret.
I could follow
my master's reasoning.
I was sympathetic
to her plight.
The company had
its own hunger.
We all would
have to give.
What of the other workers?
Where did they figure in?
I kept my gaze
on the task
in front of me.
I waited for
my shift
to end.
You want more police, you said, more patrols,
all of the Aurora crap pushed away,
to some other neighborhood, some other
place, someone else's
problem now, another
community's fate.
Those people don't want
help, anyway.
They want to snort powder
in the back seats of cars,
to break into decent
people's homes, to make
your mom afraid.
Our system is capitalism
and democracy, which means
people will be poor.
Just keep them the hell away.
In the poem
I have been trying
to write you,
I tell you about the hole
in my car
where the radio used to be,
how it was taken
two days before
we shared garlic prawns
at the Thai restaurant on Eastlake,
everything civil,
our disagreements peaceful,
all of us equal
so long as our bank accounts were sturdy enough
to sustain cocktails and Pad Thai and beef salad
alongside talk of the homeless
and criminal justice and the mayor and your lawn
You see? I have been trying to write you a poem,
but all I can come up with
are these banal thoughts
and prosaic observations.
In the poem I have been trying
to write you, I tell you about the hole
in my car where the radio used to be,
how before work each morning
I look down at cords and wires
and Styrofoam.
How its absence reproaches me
like a wound, a rupture
between how I live now
and the experience that used
to belong to me.
I tell you about the thief,
who I never saw but now sense,
a small man a little ashamed
as he reached down to detach
the wires exacting the minimum
amount of damage.
I tell you about the pity
that he felt for me
and the lack of peace
that he held in himself.
I tell you about his sadness
and fragility and fear.
I tell you that the police
will not help you.
I tell you that the prawns
will not help you.
I tell you that playing civil
or socialized or familial
will not help you.
I tell you
that you will die.
fuck
At home, I tell my vegetarian friends
that I admire them,
and I do, I think, sneaking mouthfuls
of boiled bird
from the walk-in freezer
I am a dissolute
and undisciplined creature,
but I harbor no illusions
that I am alone.
you know how sometimes you want to write about the working class
you go to the factory district
but there is no working class
just a bunch of hipsters drinking coffee
when you see out of the corner of your eye a giant shadow
it must be a representative of the working classes
you think
and you prepare to write about
how the working class still lives and breathes
when the shadow comes out from around the corner
and puts its finger in your face
don’t write about me, it says,
I know your kind
you make things up that can never happen
then the rest of us spend a century cleaning up the mess
why don’t you write instead
about how with your elegant thin white fingers
that have known neither factory machines nor farm implements
(although, you know what, you can skip that part)
you break off a piece of delicious biscotti
yeah. that would be a lot more realistic
after all you’re so interested in realism
so why don’t you write about how on a sunny May afternoon
you pour yourself a glass of rich red wine
and it sends sparks off your glass, like a snow globe
and as for me I think I can live without
another poem about me, by you,
and anyway what new thing can you say about me?
I know everything about myself already
whereas about a sunny May afternoon
about how ineffably sad one sometimes feels
and how she has such enormous crystal eyes
this you know far better than I
write it. Write about
how a vase full of flowers
wakes up
and pours a child out of itself, with the water
just don’t write about a day in the life of the workers of AvtoVAZ3
and don’t write about young Lenin
write, like Mandelstam, about the yearning for world culture
put yourself somewhere between the bedroom and the chapel
just don’t write anymore about the foundation pit
and try to keep yourself from mentioning solidarity
I think you understand what I’m saying
go and write it
and we’ll read it when we have a break
or maybe we’ll go fishing
or to the bathhouse for a sauna
or maybe to pick mushrooms, the mushrooms are coming up you know
or maybe we’ll go to the theater with our wives using our union cards
or maybe we’ll see the football game, Spartak is coming on, who do you root for?
I apologize if I’ve offended you
the working class has a diverse range of entertainment options
we don’t always have a chance to keep up with contemporary poetry
all right
the main thing is don’t get depressed and start thinking of doing something stupid
I know you poets
first thing that happens you go shooting yourselves or tying up a noose
and then after that our kids come home from literature class all pale
like from another world
they start crying and yelling
dying isn’t anything new in this life
fuck it!
sorry
all right, off you go
before I mess up and say anything else
hurt your feelings
and then you’ll get all inward-looking
you’re the one who taught me
a class in itself must become a class for itself
so live for yourself a little bit
relax
take a break
learn to take some pleasure in life
and don’t be so quiet
why are you quiet all the time?
you scare me with this silence of yours
you’re a prophet, after all
so rise up and speak
inflame our hearts
with your elevated verbiage
nothing that is human is alien to us
in fact maybe it’s through you that we see it
otherwise what the fuck do we need you for
if not to tell us things that have never happened
and about paradise here on earth
by Roman Osminkin
Residents of the area call it the crematorium.
It has revealed the undercurrents of our age.
The poor who thought voting for the rich would save them.
The poor who believed all that the papers said.
The poor who listened with their fears.
The poor who live in their rooms and dream for their kids.
The poor are you and I, you in your garden of flowers,
In your house of books, who gaze from afar
At a destiny that draws near with another name.
Sometimes it takes an image to wake up a nation
From its secret shame. And here it is every name
Of someone burnt to death, on the stairs or in their room,
Who had no idea what they died for, or how they were betrayed.
They did not die when they died; their deaths happened long
Before. It happened in the minds of people who never saw
Them. It happened in the profit margins. It happened
In the laws. They died because money could be saved and made.