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The feature on “Poetry and Populism” is unusual for us—it possesses an overtly political focus.  Almost all of the pieces are from a liberal/left perspective. We welcome essays that engage poetry or music—as well as original poems and satire—that address the topic of poetry and populism from other perspectives.

I

Stir up the brain, awake the sleeping soul;
arise, and let us go to contemplate
how life slips by, how it declines to wait,
how silent death will come to seize control,
how quickly every pleasure ebbs away
but leaves a memory painful to recall,
and how it seems to our best judgment all
that’s past looks so much better than today.

IV

I will forsake the fancy invocations
of all the orators and poets of fame.
I have no taste for their sweet fabrications—
that flavor has its poison just the same.
I will commend myself to one alone:
that one alone do I invoke as true,
who while he lived in this world as his own,
this world his living godhead never knew.

VII

If somehow it could be in our control
to beautify this low and carnal face
the way that we can strive to run the race
and clothe with glory our angelic soul,
what diligence would spur our days, what zeal,
what labor spent in lively urgency,
to dress the bondslave up in finery
and leave the Mistress all in dishabille.

XV

The Trojan tribe we might as well forget:
we never saw their pangs or victories.
And we can disregard that Roman set,
although we read and hear their histories.
What happened one short century ago?
Who cares? Our memories have acquiesced.
Now look at yesterday: one glance will show
it’s in oblivion, just like all the rest.

 

Coplas por la muerte de su padre

I

…Recuerde el alma dormida,
avive el seso y despierte,
…………..contemplando
cómo se passa la vida;
cómo se viene la muerte
…………..tan callando;
cuán presto se va el placer;
cómo, después de acordado,
…………..da dolor;
cómo, a nuestro parecer,
cualquiere tiempo passado
…………..fue mejor.

IV

…Dexo las invocaciones
de los famosos poetas
…………..y oradores;
non curo de sus ficciones,
que traen yerbas secretas
…………..sus sabores.
Aquél sólo m’encomiendo,
Aquél sólo invoco yo
…………..de verdad,
que en este mundo viviendo,
el mundo non conoció
…………..su deidad.

VII

…Si fuesse en nuestro poder
hazer la cara hermosa
…………..corporal,
como podemos hazer
el alma glorïosa
…………..angelical,
¡qué diligencia tan viva
toviéramos toda ora
…………..e tan presta,
en componer la cativa
dexándonos la señora
…………..descompuesta.

XV

…Dexemos a los troyanos,
que sus males non los vimos,
…………..ni sus glorias;
dexemos a los romanos,
aunque oimos e leimos
…………..sus hestorias;
non curemos de saber
lo d’aquel siglo passado
…………..qué fue d’ello;
vengamos a lo d’ayer,
que también es olvidado
…………..como aquello.

 

Jorge Manrique (c. 1440-1479)

Born sometime around 1440, the poet and soldier Jorge Manrique came from an important family in Castile. He died in 1479, fighting for Queen Isabella in a civil war over succession. Manrique wrote courtly love poetry, but he also left us one of the most important works in Spanish literature, Coplas por la muerte de su padre, [Stanzas on the Death of His Father]. Each of Manrique’s coplas contains twelve lines of pie quebrado or “broken foot” verse: octosyllabic lines interspersed with four-or-five syllable lines. The Coplas commemorates Manrique’s father, Rodrigo, and expresses Christian faith and devotion; but the work also muses on topoi like the vanity and brevity of earthly life—typical themes for both medieval and early modern poetry. Yet Manrique’s verse astonishes for two reasons: first, its tight, pithy articulation of these themes within a highly constrained form, and second for his inventive metaphors. This selection of four out of the forty Coplas highlights these accomplishments.

A girl at play beneath her teenage bangs,
I was outside the front gate hunting flowers
when you charged in astride a bamboo horse,
flung plums my way and galloped round in rings.

We were naïve and happy as could be
back then, two neighbor children in Chang-kan.
When made, my lord, your bride, I was fourteen
and never smiled because I was so shy.

Shrinking, head lowered, in the lampless larder,
I shunned your thousand calls to “Come out, please.”
Laughing by fifteen, though, with loosened brows,
I knew no dust could snuff my wifely ardor.

A silent soldier in a tower till death,
I would keep watch for you; I would be true.
When I turned sixteen, business sent you through
the Gorges of Chu-tang, through rock and froth.

Desperately, when the fifth month waiting came,
I strained to hear the strange apes where you were.
Gone were your footprints leading from our door.
The sea-green peat moss that had coated them

had grown too deep to sweep up. Autumn, then,
further interred them when it stripped the trees.
Now, in the eighth month, yellow butterflies
pair off above our lush west-garden lawn.

They are the reasons why my heart is raw.
I fear my vaunted cheeks have lost their bloom.
Send me a message you are heading home
once you have reached the three precincts of Pa

and, never mind the distance, I will race
even to Chang-feng Sha to glimpse your face.

Li Bai, wino, lunatic, came, they say, from far Suyab (now Kyrgyzstan) to less uncouth regions of Tang-Dynasty China, where he, much beloved by his fellow poets, drowned while drunkenly reaching for a reflection of the moon in water. This particular poem has been famously translated by Ezra Pound as “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter.”

After Federico García Lorca

The night rose over us; the full moon glared.
I wept then, but you mocked me on my knees.
And your disdain was a god, which made my pleas
sound like the cooing of a dove ensnared.

The night fell over us. A jewel of hurt,
you wept for how remote we had become.
And my despair then did not leave you numb
but sank into your fragile heart of dirt.

Dawn found us together in our bed,
mouths searching out and kissing tenderly
jets of cold blood from wounds each had inflicted.

And the sun came through the shutters from the balcony,
and the coral of life opened its branches and spread
above my shrouded heart a mystery

*

Noche de amor insomne

Noche arriba los dos con luna llena,
yo me puse a llorar y tú reías.
Tu desdén era un dios, las quejas mías
momentos y palomas en cadena.

Noche abajo los dos. Cristal de pena,
llorabas tú por hondas lejanías.
Mi dolor era un grupo de agonías
sobre tu débil corazón de arena.

La aurora nos unió sobre la cama,
las bocas puestas sobre el chorro helado
de una sangre sin fin que se derrama.

Y el sol entró por el balcón cerrado
y el coral de la vida abrió su rama
sobre mi corazón amortajado.

After Bertolt Brecht

1.

I, Bertolt Brecht, came from the black forests.
My mother took me to the city when I lay
Inside her womb. And yet the chill of the forest
Will stay with me until my dying day.

2.

In the asphalt city, I feel at home. From the start,
Provided with every modern sacrament:
With newspapers. And tobacco. And good brandy.
Mistrustful, idle, but, mostly, quite content.

3.

I’m polite to all the people I meet. I wear
A derby hat because that’s what they do.
I think: They sure are funny smelling animals.
And then I think: Who am I to care? I’m one too.

4.

In my parlor’s rocking chairs, sometimes you’ll find
A couple women letting the morning pass them by,
And I’ll look at them indifferently and say,
“In me, you have a man on whom you can’t rely.”

5.

Toward evening, it’s the boys who come to visit.
We address one another as “gentlemen.”
They prop their feet up on my coffee table
And say, “Things will get better.” And I don’t ask them, When?

6.

In the gray light of the dawn, the pine trees piss,
And their vermin, the birds, begin to loudly cheep.
At that hour, in the city, I finish my drink, then toss
The butt of my cigar and, worried, go to sleep.

7.

We’ve settled here, a trivial generation,
In houses we thought would be invulnerable
(So, too, we’ve built skyscrapers on Manhattan Island
And ocean antennae that should not be possible).

8.

What will remain of this city is what blew through: the wind.
The house makes merry: the feast is gone in a second.
We know that we are only provisional
And that after us will come nothing that need be mentioned.

9.

When the earthquakes come, I hope that I can keep
My Virginia hot— but not too bitter, though.
I, Bertolt Brecht, brought from the forest to the city
Inside my mother’s womb some years ago.

**

Vom armen B.B.

1.
Ich, Bertolt Brecht, bin aus den schwarzen Wäldern.
Meine Mutter trug mich in die Städte hinein
Als ich in ihrem Leibe lag. Und die Kälte der Wälder
Wird in mir bis zu meinem Absterben sein.

2.
In der Asphaltstadt bin ich daheim. Von allem Anfang
Versehen mit jedem Sterbsakrament:
Mit Zeitung. Und Tabak. Und Branntwein.
Misstrauisch und faul und zufrieden am End.

3.
Ich bin zu den Leuten freundlich. Ich setze
Einen steifen Hut auf nach ihrem Brauch.
Ich sage: Es sind ganz besonders riechende Tiere
Und ich sage: Es macht nichts, ich bin es auch.

4.
In meine leeren Schaukelstühle vormittags
Setze ich mir mitunter ein paar Frauen
Und ich betrachte sie sorglos und sage ihnen:
In mir habt ihr einen, auf den könnt ihr nicht bauen.

5.
Gegen Abend versammle ich um mich Männer
Wir reden uns da mit “Gentlemen” an.
Sie haben ihre Füße auf meinen Tischen
Und sagen: Es wird besser mit uns. Und ich frage nicht: Wann?

6.
Gegen Morgen in der grauen Frühe pissen die Tannen
Und ihr Ungeziefer, die Vögel, fängt an zu schrein.
Um die Stunde trink ich mein Glas in der Stadt aus und schmeiße
Den Tabakstummel weg und schlafe beunruhigt ein.

7.
Wir sind gesessen, ein leichtes Geschlechte
In Häusern, die für unzerstörbare galten
(So haben wir gebaut die langen Gehäuse des Eilands Manhattan
Und die dünnen Antennen, die das Atlantische Meer unterhalten).

8.
Von diesen Städten wird bleiben: der durch sie hindurchging, der Wind!
Fröhlich machet das Haus den Esser: er leert es.
Wir wissen, daß wir Vorläufige sind
Und nach uns wird kommen: nichts Nennenswertes.

9.
Bei den Erdbeben, die kommen werden, werde ich
hoffentlich Meine Virginia nicht ausgehen lassen durch Bitterkeit
Ich, Bertolt Brecht, in die Asphaltstädte verschlagen
Aus den schwarzen Wäldern in meiner Mutter infrüher Zeit.

You asked if I believe we have free will.
I failed to say but feel compelled to write:
I may not mean to, but I love you still.

We didn’t know yet who would grab the bill
or whether you’d move back your morning flight.
You asked if I believe we have free will,

and we debated, over a Pinot spill,
rumors that quantum theory says we might.
I may not mean to, but I love you still.

Chance is the sergeant of an endless drill:
that’s what I choose to think. (But is that right,
you asked.) If I believe we have free will,

I’ll feel brave leaving, though I’ll stay until
I cave to instincts that I claim to fight.
I may not mean to. But I love you still,

and sometimes smile with an impromptu thrill
at what we did, at what was done, the night
you asked if I believe we have free will.
I may not mean to, but I love you—still.

After, there is a crystal stillness,
like in a dream seconds before it shatters
into waking light. Nothing moves.
Silence radiates up from hidden streets
broken only by the crack of limbs
beneath the heft of new snow.

Come morning the big plows
will raze this shimmering tableau
and everything will begin again.
For now, we watch from darkened windows,
unable to make a sound, to even breathe,
in fear of what small ruin we might bring.

……………The sun goes down over a smoky village,
Northern India. A dim ghostly music
…………………………rising from the huts; some lights pop on.

……………The stray dogs that slept all day,
in their fields, on street corners,
…………………………raise their heads, as one.

……………They wake at night and howl and bay,
and fight other dogs for territory.
…………………………1000 years it’s been this way.

……………Stray dogs packs are killing children in Sitapur!
You can read it in The Indian Express. School attendance
…………………………dropped. Police of Uttar Pradesh

……………are called for extra forces. Villagers are
furious. Bearded men bludgeon dogs
…………………………with farm tools, cricket bats. The dogs

……………run away in packs, howling,
out of the village, out of their territories.
…………………………Villagers are killing whole packs of dogs,

……………all the dogs. You can never be too sure.
Do the dogs all have rabies? Yes!
…………………………say the bearded men. Even the pet dogs?

……………Yes! Women in saris hurl pet dogs
over balconies, into the fields.
…………………………The fluffy manicured Chow Chow,

……………bell on its neck; the tiny white Poodle,
nervous as a squirrel. Pet dogs join the street dogs
…………………………running out of the village.

……………Do the bearded men have rabies? They’re so angry.
Does the whole world, with its anger, have rabies?
…………………………Maybe. Rabies: lyssa, hydrophobia,

……………or canine madness, or just plain madness.
A team of expert monkey-catchers is called to catch the dogs.
…………………………They have long poles with nooses.

……………How nimble dogs are, sliding under porches,
hiding in tall grass. A 7-year-old girl gathers mangoes
…………………………in the field beside her house:

……………suddenly the dogs, normal street dogs,
tear her apart, eating her alive!
…………………………All verified in The Indian Express.

……………What do the dogs want? Have we heard
their demands? Villagers on Royal Enfields
…………………………chase dogs down the mountain paths.

……………Villagers drag the tall grass
with fishing nets. Street dogs skitter off,
…………………………tails between legs, pale, ghostly,

……………dextrous skeletons, out of the village.
Bearded men scoop up the puppies in burlap bags,
…………………………raise up the bags, singing ragas,

……………and dunk them in the river.
It’s the only thing to do! Lyssophobia, says The Indian Express,
…………………………is the morbid dread of catching rabies.

……………Or a psychological condition in humans
which mimics rabies. Or a fear of going insane, a fear of disease,
…………………………all fears of all disease.

……………The rage that makes us animals. Lyssa, wolfness,
related to lykos, or wolf. Dogs sun themselves
…………………………in a nearby field. A skinny black mother dog

……………called Indira Ghandi, Dee for short, with tall bat ears,
now very pregnant, licks a canister of ghee
…………………………with her long tongue. From the road

……………an old man with his goats whistles and
the bearded men in kurtas are shouting,
…………………………drifting in packs toward the dog packs.

……………A villager nabs Dee by her hind legs,
another hits her with a shovel, her blood in the mud
…………………………and plastic of the garbage river.

……………Lyssa, the Greeks called Hector’s rage, also meant light.
The Adriatic Sea at dusk,
…………………………the glittering eyes of the mad.

……………As when Hector’s eyes spot Achilles’ shield.
Or Dee noticed a canister
…………………………of ghee in the grass.

for Joshua Mehigan

We never meet. It’s been a year
A stylus scores
the anthems of leaving
and broadcasts them to the air.

Suffice it to say, I think of you
behind closed lids.
Keep well. For though you’re
impossibly far, you carry

with you the me most me.
How has it come to this?
It grew up without my knowing:
alive in me still there with you.

‘Well, well,’ said he, ‘I suppose I shall have to compound a felony as usual…’
…………………….– “The Adventure of the Three Gables”

Lestrade was waiting by the phone. “That Times
reporter said she’d call about the crimes
I logged back in the early ’90s. Why
now, after all these years, they’d magnify
a few discrepancies…” He was addressing
his young wife Flora, a belated blessing
in the long afternoon of his retirement.

“Back then, to be an occasional liar meant
nothing to Holmes. He let some rogues away–
count on it, Flo. ‘Where Are They All Today?’
That’s surely better copy than the tripe
these vermin peddle. Set it up in type:
‘He who would label Scotland Yard obtuse
was sometimes given to the gross abuse

of his authority as London’s first
private detective. Nightly he immersed
himself in gaslit netherworlds.’ The thing
to ask yourself is whether parroting
street dialects and aping dissolute
characters might have marred him at the root.
Did his disguises give him sympathy

for felons he would catch and let go free?
To one who could so brutally disparage
fellow professionals, the blithe miscarriage
of justice was as rosin to his bow.
It made his caustic tune stand out, you know:
The rhapsodies he played to intellect,
chill and severe, implied that to detect

a pattern was the ultimate reward.
Small matter if he wasn’t above board
in all he told us, holding something back,
but so minute we didn’t feel the lack.
‘Enter Inspector Lestrade.’ I was the bloke
who tidied after him. No, I misspoke–
The pattern was intact and didn’t need

some gap of logic to be remedied
or even an interpreter. Instead,
a lackey or a fool was warranted.
Someone to close the files and tell the press
we’d found our man. All right, so I confess
this gradual exposure made me ask:
did I not own an enviable task?

As Watson made his flatmate’s exploits live,
so I could now control my narrative.
No longer would the Yard be called a ground
for raising mediocrities. I found
reporters quite susceptible to hints
that showed up later in the daily prints–
how Holmes, who claimed a window on the truth,

consorted with all manner of uncouth
specimen – Think of his ‘Irregulars’
and hope those wretches didn’t pick up scars
from sequestration with such a strange bird.
‘Irregular’ indeed. I’d never heard
of a grown man procuring services
from boys without immoral purposes

in mind. Why, yes – I mean just what I say.
(Flo, will you pull down the Tanqueray?)
We know already Watson had enabled
most of his vices – not so much the fabled
‘seven percent solution,’ but the zest
for treating each encounter as a test
of his deductive powers. Generalize

like that and in most prosecutors’ eyes
you’d be accused of making specious charges.
With every year, my hate for him enlarges
to an extent you won’t find credible.
(This Stilton, Flo, is scarcely edible.)
Why, who was he to annex those he saw
for only a few minutes to a law

of his abrupt devising, under which
everyone’s life was laid by in a niche
that he could label ‘solved’? No mystery
being allowed to linger, you’d say he
was thorough in some matters, yet how little
he cared to see a job through. Non-committal
in witness boxes up and down the land,

he wore an abstract stare. It stoked demand,
abetted by accounts his Boswell penned.
I was an early spotter of the trend:
Too many times Holmes shrugged and said the case,
while solved, had merited an act of grace
for the transgressor – but he never gave
such thoughts to any victim in the grave,

or toff who had been swindled, or the time
we’d wasted on dead leads. Even the Prime
Minister looked in, and looked the other way.
He hardly cared if justice had its day,
but wanted to be shown to be in thick
with London’s most beloved eccentric.
(I still gag now – or, Flo, is it the cheese?)

My own solution caught on by degrees.
I would avail of his indifference
to credit and to criminal offense.
If all he wanted was the satisfaction
of intellect, he could part with some fraction,
surely, of fame and repute. Why should I
be painted as the blunderer? Too high

for us mere mortals, Holmes couldn’t evade,
nevertheless, all that my lowly trade
could bring against him. Death by paperwork!
It happened every week I’d send a clerk
to Baker Street, to shadow his procedures.
And writers of four editorial leaders
were in my trench-coat pocket. Such attrition–

dogs at his heels – defeated his precision,
also his love for the chase. Watson, too,
began to drink and slowly shrink from view,
especially when I had planted doubt
even in him by putting it about
his ‘best and wisest man’ had not played straight.
There’s little that we Englishmen will rate

more highly, after all, than sportsmanship.
(This gin is bloody good. You’ll have a sip?)
Holmes sank into oblivion. Bees, Flo, bees!
At Sussex Downs. But those ‘discrepancies’
in my bookkeeping…. Shall we go abroad?
Ah, now she rings!
……………………………..—No, this is Sir Lestrade.”