Christopher Hirschmann Brandt, “Twin Poems” by Eduardo Hurtado

Diana Der Hovanessian Prize, selected by Jean Dany Joachim

Twin Poems


Reasons to Dispense with Poetry
 
• Poems
   don’t sound the same any more
   (they don’t even sound
   like free verse
   used to sound.)
   History, psychoanalysis,
   the philosopher’s abstractions,
   pyrotechnic typography,
   intertext and glib eloquence
   these days supplant
   the functions of verse.
 
• Obscure, petulant,
   poets distance themselves
   from common folk.
 
• Poetry does not sell.
 
• Why waste time
   reading a poem
   when it is possible
   almost every evening
   to attend the show
   the sunset puts on?
 
• Poets
   live at the edges of life,
   they graze in the feed lot of lies.
 
• If it’s possible to live without mathematics,
   without gods, without wood,
   why not dispense with poetry?
 
• Poets today
   don’t write like they used to.
 
• If the world is a pile of shit,
   then how
   and where
   and why
   so much poetry . . .
 

Reasons Poetry Is Indispensable
 
• Poetry
   says the same old thing a new way:
   every morning it invents the morning.
 
• It is there before a thing is named.
   It is memory
   of the dream we will have.
   It is the past, present.
   It is the future, present.
 
• It is the purest of acts:
   it says not what it says
   but in saying it.
 
• A poem is no more
          -every time-
   than the glass
   in which the poem takes shape
   -and nevertheless
                      poetry
   exists on the far side
   of poems.
 
• Poetry is the record
   of an age when people
                       existed,
                                  came and went,
                                            changed,
   in a trance of poetry.
   It wants to remember everything:
   Morning. Swim.
   Bog. Stone:
   everything in order,
   from the beginning.
 
• Poetry is anyone’s poetry:
   the singular tongue of the speaker,
   the singular tongue of the hearer.
 
• No one can bathe
                                  ever
   in the same poem twice.
 
• Under the spell of a poem
   the tongue rises and falls
   like a fish in water.
 
• Poetry is memory
   – and it negates
   the sentimental.
   When poetry is present, a presence,
   no sentimentality exists that can enter its realm.
 


Christopher Hirschmann Brandt is a writer, political activist, translator, carpenter, actor and theatre worker who teaches poetry workshops and Peace and Justice courses at Fordham and Pace Universities. His poems, essays and translations have been published in Spain, France, and Mexico as well as in US journals and anthologies.  chribrndt@aol.com