Molters, I heard Heather McHugh last night. She was pretty damn wonderful! Here's a poem she read and I really like. Poetry rules! Jefe
From the Towers
Insanity is not a want of reason.
It is reason's overgrowth, a calculating kudzu.
Explaining why, in two-ton manifesti, thinkers sally forth
with testaments and pipe bombs. Heaven help us:
spare us all your meaningful designs. Shine down or
shower forth, but (for the earthling's sake) ignore
all prayers followed by against, or for. Teach us to bear
life's senselessness, our insignificance, and more;
let's call that sanity. The terrifying prospect isn't some
escapist with a novel, fond of comfort, munching sweets—
it is the busy hermeneut, so serious he's sour, intent on making
meaning of us all, and bursting from the towers to the streets.
5 comments:
Wow! What an excellent way to start the weekend --- with wonderful poetry (and song)!
This is the "Serenity Prayer" that I want to recite every day from here on end.
I'm printing this and it's going straight into my wallet, where I can take it out and read it any time I want to.
Thanks for posting, Jefe.
This rocks!! I typically avoid 9-11 poems (I was there and waiver between wanting to forget and just being tired of all the attention) but I'm SO with her.
Don't know for sure, but I bet she wrote this on that day. It's an example of how writing in the emotional moment can make or break the poem. In this one it works beautifully.
Back to my tale. Happy weekend everyone.
Lori, No, she wrote this a long time after the event, knowing that temporal distance would help her
focus on more than the horror of it all, to make art out of terror. This, one of a series of related 9-11 poems, exemplifies the opposite of writing in the emotional moment, maybe something like Wordsworth's "recollected in tranquility." Jefe
I could no more write in the "heat of the moment" than I could fly to the moon. For me, that is a physical and practical impossibility.
There are moments in our lives which will always evoke the exact same emotions that we felt at the height of a dramatic experience. As artists, I think, we can even summon them in the same way that an actor can summon tears for a role he/she is playing.
I think one of the most successful things about this poem is the "chill" of its quasi-detachment.
The application of rational thought to this mindblowing experience is what makes this, IMO, such a successful piece, whether it be about September 11th, Pearl Harbor, Nazi Germany, the Craig's List Killer, or domestic violence, etc., ad infinitum.
IMO.
JC, thanks for the clarification. Wow is all I can say. She is impressive! Sometimes I've tried to write my thoughts during an event, not expecting them to amount to anything, but tapping into that energy later. It rarely works for me anyway. I'm better off living in my imagination and just making, er, stuff, up!
PS she edited the Best American Poetry series, 2007 edition. A few poems I absolutely loved, but not the rest. She's big on wordplay and sound for the sake of sound (at least in that collection). Respectable, but not my bag. I really love her 9-11 poem, though.
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