I’m recuperating from surgery after a broken hip and, along with catching up
on teaching and grading, I’ve been working on sets of short lyrics, some of
which have been roughed out pretty quickly. I’m aiming to engage—as with
many of the other poems I’ve self-published here on this blog—with what
Walter Benjamin called a politicizing of the aesthetic. I recognize the artifice
of my own language (that’s what lyric writing pretty much is for me), but also
a demand to connect that might even overwrite that artifice, cross it up and
fracture it.
Here’s a piece written in an hour or two—so closer to a briefly attenuated improvisation—about some media reports of bombed public libraries in Gaza. I’m also thinking about the poetry of Mosab Abu Toha, and his work on libraries, although I hope I have been mindful not to appropriate his poetics here. (In fact, that distancing might be my point.)
320.95694
You get to see reports
about bombed out public
libraries, wire photos
that document rubble—
more slaughtered rows of books
dumped from stress-buckled shelves,
like some collapsed brick wall
at an abandoned dig;
torn spines, cloth covers caked
with pulverized concrete;
discarded ordinance, non-
fiction heaped in makeshift
mass graves. Dewey cutters
glibly obliterate
intractable conflict:
peace by bibliocide.
You can’t hope to erase
what you can’t hope to read.
