I posted this for a minute last week, then thought better of it and took it down so I could send it to another humor site, who -- what do you know! -- didn't like it. Good news, for you though, because now you can ignore it again.
Everyone talks about how stupid the news is all the time, but it's possible they simply don't understand the nuance of poetry.
Here, let's look at this story from WLKY in Louisville, Kentucky, written by one Jay Ditzer, for an example of the type of thing Yeats was talking about, if you don't mind my conjecture, when he said "Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry." Or, as he might have put it had he been around to read this story, Out of a quarrel with our impotent fathers we make poetry.
Wasn't it Frost who said A poem begins with a lump in the throat? Or, as they say in Kentucky, a lump of rock in the bindle?
Read along with me, and you'll note the moment where the commonplace news item turns on the sublime.
A Louisville man is facing disorderly conduct charges after police said they found him walking shirtless down an interstate in the middle of traffic during a rainstorm.Just as we all must walk, ultimately, alone, as Yeats said of the poet, who is, "whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.
According to arrest records, a Louisville metro police officer saw Boris Simic walking eastbound on Interstate 264 within the I-65 interchange near the airport around 5:50 p.m. Monday.Note the referent in the name, calling to mind Charles Simic, of course. Simic the Serbian-American, former Poet Laureate of the United States, had much to say about the relationship between poetry and journalism.
"Here in the United States, we speak with reverence of authentic experience. We write poems about our daddies taking us fishing and breaking our hearts by making us throw the little fish back into the river. We even tell the reader the kind of car we were driving, the year and the model, to give the impression that it’s all true. It’s because we think of ourselves as journalists of a kind. Like them, we’ll go anywhere for a story. Don’t believe a word of it. As any poet can tell you, one often sees better with eyes closed than with eyes wide open."Simic also wrote "One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other." Boris Simic, his namesake, knows well the despair of never touching, as we'll learn.
Police said cars were swerving to avoid Simic.
Stopping here, as the journalist does, to survey the world of the poem. "The poet doesn't invent. He listens." Cocteau once wrote. So does the reader listen then to the sirens of this invented world.
According to arrest records, Simic told the officer to "go (expletive) yourself" when he tried to get Simic off the roadway.
When asked why he was upset, police said Simic told them he wanted to "kick his father's ass" and he was walking on the interstate to get to Prospect, Ky.
It's a theme the Greek tragedian Sophocles himself, scribe of Oedipus The King, would recognize. But then something strange happens here, and we leave the world we know, turning, instead, toward the absurd. This space here, this is where the poetry of journalism lies. In this things you cannot invent.
Simic also told police he was mad at his father because his father will not have sex with Simic's mother, according to arrest records.
Police said Simic appeared to be under the influence of drugs.
He is charged with second-degree disorderly conduct.
Ditzer here, coming to a finish, pulls us back from our quick descent into the absurd, letting us not reflect too long on what is the central tragedy of the piece. We've landed back in the land of men and laws and sense. A sad tale, perhaps, but funny too. As Beckett said, "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world."
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2 comments:
As usual, this is very entertaining. Nicely done.
-not the guy from the other site.
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