Throwback Thursday: The Poet Declares His Renown, a Poem That Is More Than a Poem by Borges

Illustration by the author

I discovered Borges in the 1971 Fall/Winter issue of Antioch Review. There were six short pieces, each no more than half a page, which were so dense with meaning and profound that one could not help but take notice.

"A Yellow Rose" was the first to capture my fascination. It later appeared in his book Dreamtigers, as does this fantastic piece, "Everything and Nothing."

After you read these, try "The Circular Ruins," which is found in his collection Labyrinths.

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The Poet Declares His Renown

The circle of the sky metes out my glory, 
The libraries of the East contend for my poems, 
Emirs seek me out to fill my mouth with gold, 
Angels already know by heart my latest ghazal. 
My working tools are humiliation and an aguish; 
Would to God I'd been stillborn.

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Special greetings to all my blog followers in the Ukraine.

My favorite Borges-inspired stories are in this small volume: Unremembered Histories

Related Link
T.S. Eliot and Shelley Offer Clues About the Meaning of Life

Poetry Notes and a Call for Submissions

"A poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician..."
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Duluth Poet Laureate Project seeks poems from regional writers for a poetry/dance collaborative event to take place in May 2018. Send a poem on any theme and the dancers will choose a poem and create a dance in response. The poets who inspired the dance will be invited to read at the event and will receive a $50 honorarium. Send ONE poem and contact information to: elliesch@cpinternet.com or to Ellie Schoenfeld, 530 E. Skyline Parkway, Duluth, MN 55805 by January 10th, 2018.

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An appreciation for poetry is not something tacked onto my life like hand-scrawled announcements on a bulletin board. I come by it honestly; it is in my blood. My grandmother wrote poetry, influenced in that direction by her uncle John S. Hall. John Hall, the youngest of five boys, was left blind after the Civil War, whereupon he pursued a life of writing, founding two newspapers, the St. Mary's Observer and the Oracle, before retiring to private life. His book of poems, Musings of a Quiet Hour, was published in 1907. I have been told that through this lineage flows the blood of Robert Burns, the famed Scot Highlander and literary luminary.

None of this means that the poems I have written are any good, or will have historical merit. It is simply an acknowledgement of my roots.

"Poetry is the mother tongue of mankind."
--J.G.Hamann, 1762

I have a number of favorite poets whom I return to from time to time for inspiration, among these Rilke, Pessoa, Dylan and Billy Collins, whose poem Introduction To Poetry always brings a smile and a lift.

Introduction to Poetry
by Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

* * * *

If you be a poet, write on. If a reader only... Thank You.

A Thousand Lost Golf Balls

According to the book 501 Great Writers, T. S. Eliot was one of the great ones. Poet, essayist, critic, playwright and children's book author, his influence on the cultural landscape was extensive. I remember studying his works in high school with profound lines from at least two of his poems staying tethered to my soul more than forty years later. The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock made a powerful impression as did The Hollow Men, which begins thus...

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
in our dry cellar.

What powerful imagery Eliot assembled in his assessment of the times, post-WWI Europe, and its brokenness.

Eliot, who was St. Louis-born with strong New England roots, had three relatives who were U.S. presidents. Igor Stravinsky called him "a great sorcerer of words... the very key keeper of the language."

One of his greatest poems was The Waste Land. His bio in 501 Great Writers describes it as "a fractured, disjointed journey through a landscape exhausted both ecologically and culturally, inhabited by fragmented, almost ghostly voices that are connected by the yearning for rebirth."

Interestingly, on Easter Sunday four years ago, our pastor cited another poem of Eliot's, another a profound commentary on the modern world called The Rock. Eliot had been a protege of Bertrand Russell, the brilliant mathematician, activist and notorious atheist. But in seeing the futility of this line of thinking, the poet turned to away and became a Christian. Ironically he gave credit to Russell for this profound life decision.

Here is an excerpt from that poem.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust . . .
The Word of the Lord came unto me, saying:
O miserable cities of designing men,
O wretched generation of enlightened men,
Betrayed in the mazes of your ingenuities,
Sold by the proceeds of your proper inventions:
I have given you hands which you turn from worship,
I have given you speech, for endless palaver,
I have given you my Law, and you set up commissions,
I have given you lips, to express friendly sentiments,
I have given you hearts, for reciprocal distrust . . .
In the land of lobelias and tennis flannels
The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit
The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court,
And the wind shall say:
"Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls . . ."

Upon reading this, I immediately think of Shelley's Ozymandias, which offers a similar judgment on the vanity of man.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.


Life is more than the things we accumulate, the monuments we build for ourselves. Despite the injustice and suffering we see in this world, we can take comfort that there will one day be an accounting... along with the promise of better things. 

Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust... and those blasted lost golf balls.