Sunday, July 4, 2021

Andy Weaver: Two poems

 



Askesis

To stay outside a system is
the only way to know the system;
the poem strives for the untouched

sophistication of a 1992 Star
Trek commemorative plate,

unspoiled by use or usefulness.
Self denial becomes self transcendence

if we allow the fading meaning

to befit, to be proper to
. Even today
there are people who train raptors, who
keep words like jess and creance alive,

who become austringers and learn of
bechins, cadges, and the terror of the hallux.

We each embrace with fanaticism what we learn
we cannot live without, as my three-year-old

will explain to anyone, to everyone that

velociraptors do not die, they change

into birds
, and so the hawk is a site
of complication rather than exclusion,

caring not at all for either
our interest or our belief, not even

for the imperializing nature of our reading.
Yet there is no rupture with the past,

only a radical rewriting, so we speak
loaded with hope yet always in danger

of it being too clearly understood.
So we seek, not so much error as

deviation, to carelessly stray from the path,
which is the only way it widens.

Still, we end up as stuff to be utilized,
exploited, manipulated, processed,

all with the greatest efficiency. We are
forgotten just as we forgot the presence

of the words we spoke, to listen to them
in such a way that we let them tell us

their saying. Perhaps mathematics
is the truest discourse, the only

language of pureness, but who the fuck
wants to speak in the immaculate

monologue of purity? Call it the Night
of the Long Knives, the Röhm Purge,

or Operation Hummingbird, it is hard
to trust what a Nazi tells us. So choose

your own adventure: We must allow
what we dare not embrace; we must

allow, but we dare not embrace.

 

 

[In response to Juliana Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy, pp 117, 118, 131, 133, 135, and Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp xv, xvii]

  

 

The days of aesthetic knife fights

and drunken pub nights arguing over poetry
are over for us. Now, we are the indifferent middle
-aged professors sporting growing foreheads

and faster growing paunches, mortgages,
deadlines, hardening livers. We have published

and now we have realized we will still perish.

Now, (now, now!) we dream of escaping
the university salt mines, of writing mysteries
under the noms de plume Pierre Frenchstone

and Pomley Applegarth, creating fluffy plots
where the distinguished Professor Emeritus

saves the day by knowing the difference
between Spenserian and Shakespearean sonnets,

rescues the beautiful young grad student
from the new tenure tracker’s terrifying dangling

modifiers, of selling millions so we can finally sell
out, retire to the Mediterranean and cultivate

into our daily conversation old-timey terms
like noms de plume, Professor Emeritus, now-now,

and perish,
                   
perish,

perish.

 

 

 

 

Fully vaxed and slightly relaxed, Andy Weaver teaches poetry, poetics, and creative writing at York University. He has published three collections of poetry, including this (Chaudiere, 2015). His most recent publication is the chapbook Haecceity (Gap Riot, 2018), part of a collection of poems thinking through love and fatherhood.