I’m off to New York for the “Coast of Utopia” 3 play marathon on Saturday. Given Stoppard’s legendary love of words (“He uses too many!” says my friend Joseph Gifford), here’s a poem to commemorate the other end of that spectrum, where language is underspoken and unfinished…
Ars Poetica
would it wake the drowned out of their anviled sleep–
would it slip the sun like a coin behind their eyes–
The idea, the teacher said, was that there was a chaos
left in matter–a little bit of not-yet in everything that was–
so the poets became interested in fragments, interruptions–
the little bit of saying lit by the unsaid–
was it a way to stay alive, a way to keep hope,
leaving things unfinished?
as if in completing a sentence there was death–
Dana Levin
(Thank you to poet Nicole Long for sending this my way.)