We’re back up to date! 13 days, 13 poems. I got confused because one night I didn’t really sleep and forgot to write one. But we’re back on schedule. This one I will leave more or less unexplained and I’ll let you feel this one for yourself. I’ve been having a lot of fun coming up with titles for these poems and it lets me use words I know that I would never really use in my everyday life and I think that’s really neat.
Today is big amalgamation of influences. First of all, this isn’t an original poem, this is a translation. It’s up to you how you interpret which parts of the work are my own, but this is a translation of one of my favorite “history poems” by Bertold Brecht about the creation of the Dao De Jing. This was a lot of fun and a lot of my interests really flow together in this little work (the Mountain Goats, German poetry of the left, daoism, translation, etc.). The meter feels quite unintuitive to write in in English, but it flows really well when its being read aloud. So I encourage you to do that, or maybe I’ll record my own version. I will also attach the original German poem in the footnotes. For a quick translation, without giving it time to rest and reviewing it properly, I’m quite happy about this. In keeping the strange rhyme scheme intact, I think I sacrifice some of the simple language of Brecht’s original that makes him such a people’s poet, although I don’t think it’s so bad as to be deviating from that goal.
This one also feels less like a direct response to JD and more like its own little beast. Although I do think it fits into the spirit of “setting a scene, putting ghosts in it, and then getting excited about the ghosts.” I’ve mainly had the themes of a movie I haven’t seen, but would like to see flitting around in my head. Unrueh (or Unrest in English) is about the advent of industrial clockmaking in the small Swiss town of Saint-Imier and the dawn of the labor movement and European anarchism. As I said, I haven’t seen the movie, but those few details were enough for me to make my own little horologer affinity group. They are up to ✨shenanigans✨.
I’m a day late on this one and I hope I will catch up to my schedule even though this one started being written on time. I tried to stick with the formula JD mentions in the book, I feel like it makes things instantly relatable regardless of actual experience. Small, but relatable.
The weather rolls in like it owns the place.
Thick silent flakes cover the roads.
The cars slow down, way down.
And the clouds keep rolling and rolling.