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