another rainy poetry Monday

Hey folks

Feeling a little schizo today — just blogged over at firecatclub about Angie Zapata’s horrible murderer, and still feeling kindof shaken by that…but now over here to talk about poetry.

My poetry teacher has recently been trying to get us to understand more of the power inherent in that form and its history; our text this week is Dancing in Odessa, by Ilya Kaminsky, which is super fabulous.  I LOVE it and am actually going to have to get a second copy so I can mark the first copy up and yet still have one I can read.

So I suppose I will give you one of his poems.  I had thought about doing an Adam Zagajewski poem, because tonight at school we are having him for a reading, but… But I want to wallow in the Kaminsky for a while.

Here is one of my favorites.  This is the poem that opens the book, and while some critics have suggested that it is overwrought and so on, but my feeling is that THIS is why I’m supposed to be doing this writing THING.  So.  Anyway.

AUTHOR’S PRAYER

If I speak for the dead, I must
leave this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over
for the empty page is a white flag of their surrender.

If I speak of them, I must walk
on the edge of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through the rooms without
touching the furniture.

Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking
“What year is it?”
I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition and the darkest days
must I praise.