320.95694 (Poem)

 

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.