Friday 20 March 2009

UNESCO World Poetry Day 2009

To celebrate UNESCO World Poetry Day tomorrow, 21st March 2009, UNESCO will hold several events to honour the life of Pablo Neruda. A good choice. Poet-in-Residence on the other hand will pay homage a day earlier than recommended and to another poet, a man whose graveside he has had the honour to visit. Here then is a suitable poem from the pen of Joseph Brodsky a man who charged at the world with full intensity as Sven Birkerts rightly said.

Letter to an Archaeologist

Citizen, enemy, mama's boy, sucker, utter
garbage, panhandler, swine, refujew, verrucht;
a scalp so often scalded with boiling water
that the puny brain feels completely cooked.
Yes, we have dwelt here: in this concrete, brick, wooden
rubble which you now arrive to sift.
All our wires were crossed, barbed, tangled, or interwoven.
Also: we didn't love our women, but they conceived.
Sharp is the sound of the pickax that hurts dead iron;
still, it's gentler than what we've been told or have said to ourselves.
Stranger! move carefully through our carrion:
what seems carrion to you is freedom to our cells.
Leave our names alone. Don't reconstruct those vowels,
consonants, and so forth: they won't resemble larks
but a demented bloodhound whose maw devours
its own traces, feces, and barks and barks.

______________________
Joseph Brodsky 1940-96

5 comments:

  1. What a hard poem, Poet - certainly the work of a realist I would say - I have to say that I personally prefer things a bit softer.
    Somehow it reminded me of the Janacek Opera - "From the House of the Dead" - do you know it? I saw it in Birmingham about twenty five years ago performed by the Welsh National Opera - although I forget the music completely (Janacek does not make it easy for us to remember his "tunes"!) I have never forgotten the feeling of harsh reality it produced in me.

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  2. I don't know that one. I've seen Jancek's Jenufa three times over the years. It's the one where they hide the baby in the frozen stream. I visited Janacek's house in Brunn quite recently. A small garden house quite near the centre. There's not a lot to see, a few few old photos, a piano, some musical scores (may not be originals), a bit of correspondence etc. Not very much in the way of old chairs and tables
    and you have to stand far away behind a rope. But anyway you can appreciate that it was for Janacek a small oasis in a busy city.
    I like this Brodsky poem because of it's "harsh reality" as you rightly call it. Verruckte is German for madman, by the way.

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  3. love it - and the one at Brodsky's grave

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  4. Perhaps a comment from Brodsky himself would be useful to anyone thinking about this poem "What should I say about my life? That it's long and abhors transparence." From May 24, 1980.

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  5. Brodsky's life was long although what was he when he died, 50-something? The 18-months internal exile and hard labour in Russia prior to his expulsion and then his external exile must have seemed very long to him.

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