We Don't Really Know Anyone Well, But We Love One Another

First of all, I went driving again yesterday and I don't mean to brag but I'm basically the best driver in the whole universe. Nobody believes me because of that little incident when I ripped the stop sign out of the ground but guys, I was negotiating lights, I was stopping appropriately at stop signs, I even turned around in a driveway. Yeah, I know. Sophisticated stuff.

Everyone always gets on my case because my blog posts are too long, so this one will be abbreviated.


I really liked this collection of poetry. Franz Wright's other ones are pretty good, maybe a little heavy on the God stuff for my personal taste. I liked "Walking to Martha's Vineyard" so much because it's more about people than it is about the divine. My favourite poem from this collection is "5:00 Mass":

The church is a ship in the brightening snowstorm;

shafts of light falling in through blue windows.

It’s almost night and starting to get light!

The planet, too, adrift

in an infinite blizzard of stars –

Where most of us are sick

and starving in the pitching dark, and the partying

masters up above

don’t know where we are either.

We love one another. We don’t really know

anyone well, but

we love one

another.



I love the imagery there, and the reference to the "partying masters up above don't know where we are either". The idea that there are Gods/a divine presence but they are paying little to no attention to humanity. But anyway, Wright has a new book coming out in September that I'm desperately trying to get an advance copy of. Its called "Kindertotenwald", this is what the Random House website has to say about it:

"A genre-bending collection of prose poems from Pulitzer Prize–winner Franz Wright brings us surreal tales of childhood, adolescence, and adult awareness, moving from the gorgeous to the shocking to a sense of peace. Wright’s most intimate thoughts and images appear before us in dramatic and spectral short narratives: mesmerizing poems whose colloquial sound and rhythms announce a new path for this luminous and masterful poet."

On snap, if there's somebody that loves "surreal tales of childhood, adolescence" more than me, I don't want to meet her. Such a creature would surely be fearsome to behold.