J. S. Kuiken

After February’s Post-It Note Poetry, I’ve felt invigorated to keep working on my poetry and learning more about the craft of poetry. To that end I’m trying to write a poem a week. I hope, by the end of the year, I will half enough decent poetry to put together in a small collection and sell as an online e-chapbook.

This week’s poem is about philosophy, or, more precisely, the failure of philosophy to square with reality. I recently went to a reading by a poet who enthusiastically embraced philosophy and literary theory in her work. While I enjoyed talking with her, I left feeling naggingly empty. I realized later that it was because I am a realist: I see and report what I see as a writer. I try to understand reality as I see it. I don’t go after things which are rooted in the world of thought.

So I wrote a poem about it.

Dead Words

It is better to live in reality

Than try to wrestle with shadows

Vague theories

broken words and teeth

what power do they have

beyond the ruins, collapsed

and half forgotten.

unreal.

insubstantial.

those words

can’t feed

can’t nourish

can’t shine in the stars and moon.

there is no center

no eye of destruction

no flame and fury and desolate rebirth;

there is the morning sun peeking through the curtains

the sweet scent of coffee in the air

and the loveliness of one’s lover, scruffy and sleepy.

yours — yours are dead words.