[Vision2020] Summer Reading

[Warren Hayman]

Economist Rankings of the World's Greatest ChallengesHello Folks,

I would enjoy hearing of any recommendations, thoughts, and so on for what everyone will or might be reading this summer. For whoever might be interested, I can recommend two books of poetry I have read of late. Yeah, poetry, I know. The P-word. Some of us actually love it deeply, but...

One is Time and Materials by Robert Hass. It and he won both the 2007 National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. Such encomium is basically unheard of. If it helps, he is a wonderfully kind, intelligent, funny, and self-effacing person, and a poet whose poems rest light on the ear and deep in the mind. Here are two quick examples, which also underscore his range.

Iowa, January

In the long winter nights, a farmer's dreams are narrow.
Over and over, he enters the furrow.


Yup, that's it. Two lines. One more:

Ezra Pound's Proposition

Beauty is sexual, and sexuality
Is the fertility of the earth and the fertility 
Of the earth is economics. Though he is no recommendation
For poets on the subject of finance,
I thought of him in the thick heat
Of the Bangkok night. Not more than fourteen, she saunters up to you
Outside the Shangri-la Hotel
And says, in plausible English,
"How about a party, big guy?"

Here is more or less how it works:
The World Bank arranges the credit and the dam
Floods three hundred villages, and the villagers find their way
To the city where their daughters melt into the teeming streets,
And the dam's great turbines, beautifully tooled
In Lund or Dresden or Detroit, financed
By Lazard Freres in Paris or the Morgan Bank in New York,
Enabled by judicious gifts from Bechtel of San Francisco
Or Halliburton of Houston to the local political elite,
Spun by the force of rushing water,
Have become hives of shimmering silver
And, down river, they throw that bluish throb of light
Across her cheekbones and her lovely skin.


Another book I would recommend is from an author not as well-known as Hass, the former Poet Laureate and recipient of a MacArthur etc etc. The book, lent to me at first by an Iraq vet friend, is titled Here, Bullet by Brian Turner. Turner is a vet, and the book centers on the Iraq war and his time there. These poems are not diatribes against anything other than the loss of human life. They capture the honesty of bewilderment of what we are capable of doing to one another for whatever reasons. They are not pretty, but rather attain their own dark beauty within their reverence for life. They are the heart-felt and clear-headed writings of a profoundly observant and caring individual who was a soldier as well.

Here are two poems as examples. "sadiq" is Arabic for "friend."

Sadiq

    It is a condition of wisdom in the archer to be patient
because when the arrow leaves the bow, it returns no more.
                                                                                    --Sa'Di

It shoud make you shake and sweat,
nightmare you, strand you in a desert
of irrevocable desolation, the consequences
seared into the vein, no matter what adrenaline
feeds the muscle its courage, no matter
what god shines down on you, no matter
what crackling pain and anger
you carry in your fists, my friend,
it should break your heart to kill.



Here, Bullet

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta's opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you've started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the world you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel's cold esophagus, triggering
my tongues's explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.


Warren Hayman
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