I’ve been having a torrid (alas, sometimes briefly tepid) affair with poetry since the Ford administration (hey, for the most part, there’s still that blush of first attraction, that electric lust, that instantaneous connection promising a life of ecstasies). I can’t always say the same for poets.
I more frequently love the poems while I’m underwhelmed by the poet. Perhaps my relationships with poets enter too quickly into mid-life crisis–rapidly missed communications, clashing egos, old negative business that accumulates, never resolved, neither partner paying attention to the other. In April in Pullman I met one poet whose poems at first underwhelemed me (too plain, too much rehashed surrealism), and who is a poet whose modesty will win anyone over no matter what point in the engagement/marriage. Here’s one poem by a poet you might consider falling in love with, Ilya Kaminsky:
A Toast
October: grapes hung like the fists of a girl
gassed in her prayer. Memory,
I whisper, stay awake.
In my veins
long syllables tighten their ropes, rains come
right out of the eighteenth century
Yiddish or a darker language in which imagination
is the only word.
Imagination! a young girl dancing polka,
unafraid, betrayed by the Lord’s death
(or his hiding under the bed when the Messiah
was postponed).
In my country, evenings bring the rain water, turning
poplars bronze in a light that sparkles on these pages
where I, my fathers,
unable to describe your dreams, drink
my silence from a cup.
(from Dancing in Odessa, Tupelo Press, 2004)
