Letters to Yesenin #3

Last night, in a reaction to some new meds, all my joints exploded with a pain I can only describe as burning from within. I felt like shit and knew I wouldn't sleep, so I picked up Letters to Yesenin by Jim Harrison, a book I reread every year or so to remind myself to stay alive. Last night was the time; I grabbed it and a bunch of John Wieners (check out the new EPC page on Wieners) for my dark night of the soul. It's a great life-affirming read though every poem is more or less about suicide. I think this poem is from 1972 or 1973, as it describes events from the 1972 Olympics.

Letters to Yesenin

3

I wanted to feel exalted so I picked up

Doctor Zhivago again. But the newspaper was there

with the horrors of the Olympics, those dead and

perpetually martyred sons of David. I want to present

all Israelis with .357 magnums so that they are

never to be martyred again. I wanted to be exalted

so I picked up Doctor Zhivago again but the TV was on

with a movie about the sufferings of convicts in

the early history of Australia. But then the movie

was over and the level of the bourbon bottle was dropping

and I still wanted to be exalted lying there with

the book on my chest. I recalled Moscow but I could

not place dear Yuri, only you Yesenin, seeing the Kremlin

glitter and ripple like Asia. And when drunk you appeared

as some Bakst stage drawing, a slain Tartar. But that is

all ballet. And what a dance you had kicking your legs from

the rope–We all change our minds, Berryman said in Minnesota

halfway down the river. Villon said of the rope that my neck

will feel the weight of my ass. But I wanted to feel exalted

again and read the poems at the end of Doctor Zhivago and

just barely made it. Suicide. Beauty takes my courage

away this cold autumn evening. My year-old daughter's red

robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop.

Comments

Charles Rammelkamp

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Kinnell's Book of Nightmares/Under the Maud Moon

Probably everyone knows this poem and this book very well. Kinnell isn't exactly invisible in the poetry world. I loved this poem and this book from the very first time I read it, while I sat on the floor in the old Emerson College at 150 Beacon Street. I've loved kids from a time well before I had any of my own, and I could put myself in this narrator's perspective so easily it was as if I'd suddenly slid from my own life and become a real poet. ;-) I hadn't really read anything that used linebreaks so seemingly haphazard, but powerfully --I got a charge as I read it-- or a voice that seemed so assured of its right to the sentiments expressed. Irony is the rule of the day for many poets, and I don't necessarily cotton to it all the time so Kinnell is a balm for me; I can go back and read BoN and remember how it lit me up the first time and have energy to go back the page with. I'm sort of over his poems now, but the feeling comes back just a little every ti...

Karl Koweski

retaliation it was two weeks after you returned from rehab, dad I found the first vodka bottle, a Smirnoff pint, stashed beneath the driver's seat of your Ford. I propped the empty on the dashboard like a bobble-head. I didn't tell you this then, but... going into my room and leaving my dog-eared copies of Penthouse on my pillow next to the Vaseline... that was a pretty good comeback. Karl Koweski is a displaced Region Day now living in a valley in rural Alabama. His latest collection of poetry from Roadside Press "Abandoned By All Things" is out now.

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