two poems are on my mind this morning.
the first is césar vallejo's "los heraldos negros" ("the dark messengers"). it's a poem i've grown to love. when i was younger, perhaps i could imagine the blows he means, but at this point, i can look back and see myself there. i can feel the need for repeating the first line again as the last, for such blows feel like they move beyond language so that even upon repeating the story, they are not expunged. one writes the lines and then reads them again and again and one creates new poems about the same thing in the intervening moments.
the second is anthony hawley's "no poem works" (mid-way down the page). hawley's piece is a sonnet in the berrigan tradition, and it comments, with some humor, on what poetry should try and should not try. berrigan-styled sonnets often forgo the volta, and this poem does not have an apparent one, except that perhaps the last two lines turn. this piece begins with the lines "no poem works / but may try and be some." the poet** suggests that while poetry might try to be something of value (in the capitalist value system), that it does not function as a work with use value. the first 12 lines seem devoted to this theme, but then the last two lines state, "poem is no tomb / but loiters and makes new time." this lines is complicated by line twelve: "a drawer." is it that the "drawer / poem is no tomb" or is the 13th line it's own beginning so that the "poem is no tomb"? is "drawer" a determiner in this sentence or does it connect to the previous sentence? is this the shakespearean, poetry lives on idea? what exactly is a "drawer poem"? the intentional syntactical ambiguity here allows the reader to ask many questions, but the syntax of the last line seems more certain. poem is the subject of the phrase. seeing a poem as loitering is fairly easy, but how does it create new time? new time in what sense? intellectual time? the time of reading a poem? the poet leaves this fascinating question open--open in essentially the high "closed" form of english, the sonnet (which, of course, seems to be an ideal form for this exploration).
**i refer to the poet when i might typically say the speaker, but really i see the poet, the speaker, and the person of the poet as different, and in this piece i think we are dealing with the poet as speaker.
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