Reading prevents your life ever narrowing down to the humdrum, the routine or the boring. It sets the mind ablaze. It agitates the hearts. It is a good friend, whether the wind blows good or ill. There is not a single day it does not yield knowledge of interest, insights of value, moments of surprise, shocks of recognition and even visions or splendour. It graces, supplements, enhances and reinforces living.
Any place is exotic to someone who lives a few thousand, or even a few hundred, miles away. When you travel half way round the earth you enter the commonplace world of the people who live there. And what poetry does is try to capture the exotic and the commonplace and make them the same. I like how the Estonian Jaan Kaplinski’s poem “A Postcard” puts it:
Once I got a postcard from the Fiji Islands
with a picture of the sugar cane harvest. Then I realized
that nothing at all is exotic in itself.
There is no difference between digging potatoes
in our Muriku garden
and sugar cane harvesting in Viti Levu.
Everything that is is very ordinary.
or, rather, neither ordinary nor strange.
Far-off lands and foreign peoples are a dream,
a dreaming with open eyes
somebody does not wake from.
It’s the same with poetry – seen from afar
it’s something special, mysterious, festive.
No, poetry is even less
special than a sugar cane plantation or potato field.
Poetry is like sawdust coming from under the saw
or soft yellowish shavings from a plane.
Poetry is washing hands in the evening
or a clean handkerchief that my late aunt
never forgot to put in my pocket.
I catch a glimpse of an old woman in Camp Street. She is bent and poorly dressed and walks slowly. She comes to a stone bench and sits down with an obvious sigh. She slowly unties a cloth bundle she has with her. It holds a number of things including a small brown paper parcel from which she takes a piece of bread. She looks at the bread carefully, almost from all sides, and then begins to eat in slow mouthfuls. She gazes into some far distance or some distant past as she eats. Perhaps
the sigh when she sat down was a sigh of contentment. One of William Carlos William’s simple, artless poem comes into my mind.
To A Poor Old Woman
munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand
They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her
You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her
One night, after a viewing of the moon, my wife and I came inside to take a glass of wine, coffee and biscuits before sleep. I picked up an anthology of poems, Czeslaw Milosz’s A Book of Luminous Things, to read a while and one poem I read, by the Californian Steve Kowit, put the beauty of the moon, and all beauty, in one perspective it must always have – its inescapably fleeting nature. It is the common fate of beauty and ourselves.
N O T I C E
This evening, the sturdy Levis
I wore every day for over a year
& which seemed to the end in perfect condition,
suddenly tore.
How or why I don’t know,
but there it was – a big rip at the crotch.
A month ago my friend Nick
walked off a racquetball court,
showered,
got into his street clothes,
& halfway home collapsed & died.
Take heed you who read this
& drop to your knees now & again
like the poet Christopher Smart
& kiss the earth & be joyful
& make much of your time
& be kindly to everyone
even to those who do not deserve it.
For although you may not believe it will happen,
you too will one day be gone.
I, whose Levis ripped at the crotch
for no reason,
assure you that such is the case.
Pass it on.
