My favorite poet lately has been the Argentine poet Juarroz, author of fourteen books of poetry, all entitled, Vertical Poetry. There is a contemplative beauty and wisdom in his words that parallels the intentions behind my still life work and my own poetry. He has a great eye -- and love -- for "the being / of what isn't." Here is an English translation by Mary Crow, of his eleventh poem (none of his poems are titled) from his ninth collection:

Each thing is a message,
a pulse that reveals itself,
a trap door in the emptiness.

But between the messages of things
other messages get sketched,
there in the interval,
between one thing and another,
shaped by things or their absence,
as if what is
should decide involuntarily the being
of what isn't.

To find those intermediary messages,
the form that is formed among the forms,
is to complete the code.
Or perhaps to discover it.

To find the rose
that remains among the roses.

Even though they aren't roses.

We have a number of first rate living poets, still writing and publishing in the U.S. today, and in fact three of the very best, Jim Harrison, Robert Bly, and Franz Wright, just came out with superb new collections in the last couple of months. However, it would be absurd to suggest that this implies a strong and thriving culture that embraces poetry. In fact, the silence with which these new works have been met points out quite the opposite: poetry in our times has been marginalized to the point of invisibility. As far as mainstream media are concerned these books were never written. It makes me wonder how many great poets will never write their poems, and how many great poems will never be written, in the climate in which we live. But I am heartened by the words of Max Picard this morning:

"It often happens that a whole nation may not realize certain potentialities for a long period in its history. For instance, the gift of poetic creation may remain dormant. But the potentiality is not destroyed, it is simply not realized. It may be resting and recuperating in the silence. Yet there is beauty in such a silence, the beauty that comes from the all-permeating silence of unwritten poetry." -- The World of Silence (1948)