The Most Important Poem In The World
1. This is the most important poem in the world. This is the most important poem ever written, because it is about you who are reading it, not about me and my concerns. Leap, leap into the unknown, it says to itself, which is not what it says to you now. It will later. This poem is followed by the least important poem in the world, which is about itself, not you or me. TV commercials and other forms of massive expensive solicitude also maintain that they are entirely about those who take the trouble to attend to them: directly aimed at you, personally. They try to exact from you the belief that in all your unspeakable shimmering finitude short of your name (which how could they know?) you are really being taken into the world’s account, not just asked to accept mere citizenship of inclusion in a scattering of information meant to appeal to your selfish nature. Indeed, even you, insofar as you were born skeptical, come to wonder if the smell of your armpits is as rank as the commercials manage to suggest without actually saying “rank” or “armpits” but giving you to believe it almost as if they knew and had smelled them. Well, this poem’s importance is that it is more powerful than any other kind of message made for mortals — but don’t just believe it stay a skeptic until you’re convinced: this poem’s only concern is that you read it. It will tell you things you already know deep down but can hardly ever bring yourself to believe because never never until you read them here did you quite understand that you already knew them. This poem has written it all down THE TRUTH ABOUT YOU as you could never write it. The fact of the writing and the fact of your own Being meet here on moral ground between certainty and prophecy, the territory and atmosphere of truth where wings still tremble from the nervous completion of the descent from on high and then of alarm past and exhilaration remembered at the loftiness and the eager longing to beat up into a serene glide again. THE TRUTH You are beautiful, intelligent, strong, loved, and loving. You are beautiful, intelligent, strong, loved, and loving. Yet you will risk your life for a pin because your life, that darling, matters so much it spreads over all dangers the careless glow of your beauty, intelligence, strength, loveliness, and love. You never knew that about yourself the last time you counted your blessings, did you? Where would you have found the credit? In yourself? Never! Here it is in the poem of a stranger whose only desire is to write a poem the body of which is your own spirit and doesn’t need your approval. 2. Now suppose you are to smile smugly in the childish belief that you really are beautiful, intelligent, strong, etc., a belief that sinks in the sands of your wisdom, of your riper sense of judgement and doubt that won’t have any truck with vanity — that childish warmth as of wetting the bed and stretching out in it — and its gradual accumulation of neurotic symptoms or the guilt that leads to heavy drinking? You will then be astute enough to understand (a mark of your superior intelligence) that wherever conviction lies it has not become entangled by self-deception. So say it aloud, meaning every word: “I am beautiful, intelligent, strong, loved, and loving even as this poem told me so!” Although the odds are we never laid eyes on each other, you and I, my declaration about you is more conscionable than any other remotely like it that ever came at you out of the blue. If, then, such a burden of Truth is indeed borne by this poem, why do I insist on calling it a “poem”? For, surely, it can’t amount to more than an incantation, not being characterized by the authentic monumental indifference a poem should own in your presence as its reader. Ah, but Blake, Shelley, Whitman, Ginsberg can not have written in vain — take the magic out of poetry and the poem becomes an Onan’s Delight concentrating so much attention to itself it hardly knows you’re in the same room. You might as well be back in Tuttletown as read it. AND THE TRUTH LIVES ON Hold an eon’s teardrop in your hand, the weightlessness of a precious stone, and turn it slowly in the coruscating light: O the vanities, the swift appearances and disappearances of everything that matters most and is too much to bear, your amazing greatness that the fiberglass smiles of the manic sentiment specialists can’t falsify anymore once you’ve read the true version here. These verses constitute the essential poem, every reader’s own poem, because they have succeeded in putting the oblique straight, by declaring that you’re still the beautiful, intelligent, strong, loved lover who matters beyond belief and wisdom where your wings are now folded over the most important poem in the world.
The Least Important Poem In The World
This verse of mine proceeds from left to right and snaps suddenly back to the left again until the destined end of the line once more flings left in backward-forward spatial argument according to the typographic demand of the rigid vertical margin on one side and the determination by verse rhythm of the wriggling vertical margin on the other, my only subject the self-propelling progress and recoil that must in no wise drift from the track. It needs no further esthetic or rhetorical parade of means in justification. O there are many poems that pay scant acknowledgment to verbal devices, conceits, and other attributes of style and form, and just by winding out from pillar to post make their conditions clear even as this, the least important poem in the world, does the lightning of your glance prepares me for the thunder in your brow dear friend yet see how inappropriate, how lost amid this limping gait which is all the matter here such an apostrophic insertion is — best you keep away, removed from my verse, which otherwise would find its least importance in the world embarrassed by your beauty, intelligence, strength and (go, now, go!)
