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Christmas Poem 2003
Last December, I "retired"
from writing poetry, and I haven't written an original poem since
(other than collaborations), but on Halloween of this year I went
alone to see an exhibit at the Denver Art Museum called "From
El Greco to Picasso," on tour from the Philips Museum, the
first American modern art collection (begun in the early twenties).
Besides every painting in the collection being
beautiful (having been culled from thousands of paintings in the
complete collection), it was also here that I for the first time
saw how the “cool” colors
receded in a painting by Cezanne, and I became so dizzy that
I had t sit on the floor for several minutes before I could go
on.
And If I
Didn’t Do It, Well, You Know, I Tried
(for Chris Bell, of Big Star)
I arrived in Memphis
and in a couple of minutes
this guy from out of nowhere
looking like a guy who did a lot of
worrying and who later turned out to be
a wild-eyed prophet with swamped-out
madness blaring from the speakers in his studio
brought about an early exit from me,
each thinking the other ridiculous—
it’s the only moment I’ve ever really
touched genius, and that its touch was
too cold for me, but afterwards became
a major obsession, developing a taste for
troubled love, late night
confessions and
disintegration—
razored apart and taped together,
spinning out of control the
imploding beauty he became.
Last Poem for
Sarah
The order of all possible futures is raveling
into this one, where there is no room for me—
the order of the past rearranged
by whatever I do next—and what I do next
is determined and invisible only to me
but will make perfect sense when it arrives
in another moment that will for a moment
seem momentous, but will only become
an unremembered nothing as nothing is
left of everything that has gone before.
Testament (for
Cocteau)
In case our creations are
curious
about their
authors.
The incomprehensible frightened me—
it was no longer a film
like everything else.
What’s become of me?
That which is unreal
cannot dream.
I am in the clouds
into which I have wandered
for an allusion with a great deal of
difficulty and a tough sort of weariness,
only to discover I have nothing
left to say.
The Role of the Poet. November 24th, Konya, Turkey
Do you believe in a Role
for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen?
No, I don’t. Do you believe in a Role for the Dentist? My dentist is
more important to me than any poet.
—John
Tranter
There is a difference
between people who write poems and poets. Poets are those who
embody a way of being in the world with a somewhat historically
standardized and accurate profile. They are in a world of their
own—in the world but not of it—like a door unhinged,
by inclination or experience. Poets live apart from others, are
free-spirited in their behavior and morals, and there’s
also something slightly effete or dark and bookish and ultimately
removed about them. A poet is fully aware in all moments of where
they are in relationship to time and mortality—and so are
not really where they seem to be at all. When I told people in
Ireland
that I was a poet, they brought me into their parlor and confessed
everything to me, as if I were a priest. When people feel they
are on an endless escalator going nowhere, the poet can articulate
thoughts that take people for a ride to somewhere,
or remind them of what has been forgotten, and sometimes this
remembering is a form of medicine that can redeem a life.
Being a poet is a
responsibility. As they say, “First, do no harm.” Sometimes
this is like Rumi, turning in circles around his heart, sometimes this is
like Whitman, walking the streets of Brooklyn with new eyes, or like those
who sing of things hermetic in order to make them visible, like Blake, or
those who transform the ordinary into its true amazement, or those who
dance in the center of a crowd, turning the random mass into a throbbing
wholeness. Or those who sing, who weave, who sculpt, who paint something
that is really something else, leading the eye to where the artist’s
eye is, not was. To do the real work so that your voice can become
something other than just your voice, to transcend thought and then stay
transcendent, to become something so much of the essence that the sense of
self and time itself disappears. A poet is not interested in creating the
new because they’re more interested in discovering what is already
here. Nothing of imagining could equal this. A poet unmakes. A poem or a
painting or any work of art is not a representation of something, it is
something. It is a sharp image of what is, and still is, not what was or
what will never be. A poem waits, a poem lurks, a poem hovers, breathing on
its own. It teases us, is it something being told to us, or is it something
we remember? A poem is like a sharp wind that scatters the clouds. A poem
is a vision captured not by the eye in the skull but the eye that sees
through the eye, first as the beloved and then as many other things as
well, until all of the obstacles to joy have fallen away.
And then in the abject failure of every attempt at
trying to realize, we realize we cannot realize and have no desire to
realize any longer. We cannot hold it or become what we want but can only
get out of its way and surrender to it, and then a nothing, a no one,
discovers there is nothing left, and that only when there is nothing left
can we know for certain what we are and what we are not.
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