Not About Knowledge, But To Live With Desire

Not About Knowledge, But To Live With Desire - Poem by William Bronk

The Ignorant Lust After Knowledge

BY WILLIAM BRONK (1918-1999)

I come in from the canal. I don’t know anything.

It is well and good to ask what we need to know

as if it were all, as if we didn’t need.

Well, I need. I may never know anything

but I need. One sees desire not

as something to satisfy but to live with.

A light, this side of the hill toward Argyle,

flowed like fog through the hollows, rose to the depth

of the hills, illumined me. I faded in it

as the world faded in me, dissolved in the light.

No one to know and nothing knowable.

Oh, we know that knowing is not our way;

But, the choice ours, would make it our way, would leave

the world for the same world made knowable.

- From To Praise The Music (1972)

***

Not knowledge, but to live with desire

***

Michael Heller remarks in the New York Times Book Review, Bronk’s poetry “offers another way of looking at our common humanity, not in some imagined concurrence of shared knowledge, but in our need to construct and reconstruct worlds, in our attempts to appease a common metaphysical hunger”

***

Comments

Breaking Heads - Two Rompecabezas From Nicanor Parra

PUZZLE by Nicanor Parra I give no one the right. I love a piece of rag. I shift tombs back and forth. I shift tombs back and forth. I give no one the right. I'm a ridiculous sort In the light of the sun, The plague of soda fountains Dying of rage. I am a hopeless case, My own hairs accuse me On the bargain altar The machines give no pardons. I laugh from behind a chair, my face fills with flies. I am the one who can’t say what he means Talking in long rows of what. I stutter, With my foot touches a sort of foetus. What are these stomachs for? Who made up this mess? It's best thing is not to let on. Thinking one thing I think something else. (Translated by W.S. Merwin) Rompecabezas No doy a nadie el derecho. Adoro un trozo de trapo. Traslado tumbas de lugar. Traslado tumbas de lugar. No doy a nadie el derecho. Yo soy un tipo ridíc...

From Academy to the Street, From Poetry To Prose

From academy to the street, from poetry to prose - Nicanor Parra – ‘My own antipoems use this blank verse. I’ve often been asked what an antipoem is and the most frequent response I’ve given, without realising what I was saying is – “an antipoem is quite simple a dramatic utterance”, and a dramatic utterance, we would have to add, is a Shakespearean blank verse. Or rather, it is a hendecasyllable that lengthens and shortens, and that oscillates between the academy, the street and the fairground. I’ve always worked with these elements: I’ve even managed to combine verse with eleven syllables and one with one syllable, and verses with prose. I thought it was a great invention of mine, but the Elizabethans were already working with these methods – Shakespeare used them in King Lear , where a large percentage of the work is written in prose, without us fully knowing what is verse and what is prose. This is very important: we could say that they are prosaic verses, or poet...

Philip Levine's Acid Rage - They Lion (lie and) Grow

THEY FEED THEY LION by Philip Levine (1968) Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, Out of black bean and wet slate bread, Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, They Lion grow. Out of the gray hills Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride, West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties, Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps, Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch, They Lion grow. Earth is eating trees, fence posts, Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones, "Come home, Come home!" From pig balls, From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness, From the furred ear and the full jowl come The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose They Lion grow. From the sweet glues of the trotters Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower Of the hams the thorax of caves, From "Bo...

Aporetica

Search This Blog