It was the first time maybe I was left speechless -and I mean speechless after a read. It’s not that I didn’t think anything about it; rather the opposite. I finished it yesterday. I had started it a while ago (in January I think), but here’s a thing about me: I don’t read poetry on a crowded bus or in between classes, or when I have a million things to do. Not new poetry, that is; I sometimes take time to read a poem I love when I know it will make me feel better. But when I read poems for the first time, I like to drown entirely in the poet’s universe. And I need piece and quiet. To me, reading poetry is somehow like hitchhiking. It’s accepting to be driven by someone you don’t know, and trusting them the whole time. I’ve never hitchhiked, so I’m not sure the analogy makes a lot of sense… It’s like sleeping with someone you barely know. They unveil their beauty and their intimacy and their vulnerability to you, and so do you by embracing it. And there’s a magical bond between you, you peer into a soul; but you don’t see as much as you feel. That’s what poetry is to me, and that might explain why I stood at my window last night, gazing at the stars, unable to sleep, crying. 

Of course, I knew who Allen Ginsberg was and I had read ‘Howl’. I read it after I overheard a my Lit teacher talk about it in the teacher’s room. Yes, I was fifteen or sixteen and I worshiped my Lit teacher (still do) and if she said it was good, I had to read it. Only, I guess I was too young. Too young to fully understand it. Too young to completely feel and experience it. Today, I’m ten years older and it speaks to me, to parts of me that crave unbound freedom, a world with less close-mindedness, where people would be celebrated -not judge- for their nonconformity.  And I try to find adjectives, to tell people about those poems I read and I can’t find any. Oh, there are plenty that comes to mind, but none that seem adequate. Brilliant, beautiful, exciting, hypnotizing, revealing, unique? All I know is that it left me staring out my window with tears of intense…of intense what? I’m not even sure why I cried at the end end of the road, I just know I loved every second of the trip.

Ginsberg is a wordsmith: his words hit, ring and beat in a way you can’t be indifferent. Mark Ford made a great job assembling the poems the way he did, and if you allow me, I’ll disclose here the last one, in hopes it makes you want to read those that precede:

Objective Subject

It’s true I write about myself

Who else do I know so well?

Where else gather blood red roses & kitchen garbage

What else has my thick heart, hepatitis or hemorrhoids -

What else lived my seventy years, my old Naomi?*

and if my chance I scribe U.S. politics, Wisdom

meditation, theories of art

it’s because I read a newspaper loved

teachers skimmed books or visited a museum

March 8, 1997, 12:30 A.M.

In the last week we worked together, I introduced Emma to poetry. Well, she had read poetry before and the very first class we had, we worked on a poem by Verlaine; but I wanted her to really enjoy reading poetry. So, we read a little Keats, a little Wordsworth and a little Baudelaire. It is a pleasure of mine that never gets old; there is something about poetry that instantly establish a connection between you and the poet even if he lived two centuries ago. Poetry, I think, is an intimate form of writing; I’ve learned more about Charles Baudelaire through his poems than what I read about him. A poem is an invitation into someone’s heart, it bares your soul and you can feel more naked when someone discover you through your verses than when they take your clothes off. Of course, I also learned about Baudelaire through what I read about him: the tormented young man who got kicked off one  of the most prestigious schools in France (Louis le Grand, if you wonder), the scandalous poet who was brought to court because The Flowers of Evil were considered really demoniac, the talented man who translated Edgar Allan Poe for French readers. What I love about Les Fleurs du Mal is that it was completely new while relying on the old form. We find sonnets and alexandrines, but they don’t sing the Beauty, they celebrate the ugly as beautiful. The Flowers of Evil are those faded, rotten roses; they smell and their water is brownish. But they are beautiful; to give you an example, one of the most stricking poem I’ve ever read is ‘A Carcass’, for it finds beauty in a rotting corpse and thus in human condition. Because, no matter how gorgeous you’ve been, this is how you’re going to end; not dust but mold. Also, The Flowers of Evil were called The Flowers of Evil because Baudelaire couldn’t use his original title for it: The Lesbians. I learned that only recently, and it sort of brought a new color to my reading and also maybe explained why ‘Lesbos’ is one of my favorite poems. I have delightfully cosied up with the scandalous Fleurs while preparing Emma’s classes, and I think she enjoyed the poems we worked on -especially when she understood, alone, the gray winter skies of ‘Cloudy Sky’ were a metaphor for writer’s block- and I could not be happier. I could, actually, if she gave me my copy of The Flowers back! And now, I’ll just let the poet talk:

[…]

Lesbos, where Phryne Phryne to her draws,
Where ne’er a sigh did echoless expire,
As Paphos’ equal thee the stars admire,
Nor Venus envies Sappho without cause!
Lesbos, where Phryne Phryne to her draws,

Lesbos, the land of warm and languorous nights,
Where by their mirrors seeking sterile good,
The girls with hollow eyes, in soft delights,
Caress the ripe fruits of their womanhood,
Lesbos, the land of warm and languorous nights.

[…]

What boot the laws of just and of unjust?
Great-hearted virgins, honour of the isles,
Lo, your religion is also august,
And love at Hell and Heaven together smiles!
What boot the laws of just and of unjust?

[…]

‘Lesbos’, The Flowers of Evil, Charles Baudelaire