Excerpt from Tales of the Incorrigible: A Song of Wood and Meat about a poet who lived the dream.
The story takes place in an absurd far future. Ting was an acquaintance of both Greasly and Throom. Ting spoke often of his "poet friend". That's all you need to know for this.
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Greasly told Throom the story of Brio Tojita. At the time that Ting knew Tojita, the poet was living comfortably off the proceeds from his best-selling poem “A Haiku Concerning the Fire Flowers of Southern Knurl As A Metaphor for the Endless Possibilities of Recombination.” In fact, Ting met the poet at a reception following a public reading marking the fiftieth anniversary of the poem’s publication and celebrating it as the most successful debut poem by a young left-handed poet in history, excepting two.
At the reception, Ting asked Tojita to read some of his other poems. He was shocked at Tojita’s response: “There are no others.”
Tojita had never written another poem. That evening Ting had heard Tojita’s entire corpus of work---all seventeen syllables of it. He carried in his mind the entire life’s work of a best-selling poet!
Ting had told Greasly that he remembered it word for word, but even in an otherwise empty room on a ship in Flitzville, he would not recite it. The reason being that the poem’s publisher was Gatekeep and Gouge.
Gatekeep and Gouge were notoriously keen on squeezing every last millimoola out of their properties. In the case of “A Haiku Concerning the Fire Flowers of Southern Knurl As A Metaphor for the Endless Possibilities of Recombination,” they completely removed it from print to better be able to control its distribution. Instead, they sent it out on reading tours every ten years. The rest of the time it was kept in the “G&G Vault,” safe from the eager eyes and ears of the public.
...
“He never did tell you the poem?” Throom asked.
“Never.”
“I wonder if it was any good?”
“Ting said it dragged a little in the middle but picked up at the end.”
I'm going to try something new: read poems from contemporary poets on my podcast! It's something that I have been thinking of doing for a very long time.
Wie lange dauert das denn nur?
Ah! Endlich piepst die OfenUHR!
KEKS um Keks duftet gar fein,
sollen ein Geschenk ja sein -
für Dich, wenn wir heut' BUMMELN geh'n.
Ich freu' mich darauf, Dich zu seh'n!
Today in Labor History June 20, 1912: Voltairine de Cleyre, one of the earliest feminist anarchists, died at the age 45, following a long illness. Two thousand supporters attended her funeral at Waldheim cemetery, in Chicago, where she was buried next to the Haymarket Martyrs. De Cleyre opposed capitalism and marriage and the domination of religion over sexuality and women’s lives. Her father, a radical abolitionist, named her after the Enlightenment writer and satirist, Voltaire. Her biographer Paul Avrich said that she was "a greater literary talent than any other American anarchist." The Haymarket affair, and the wrongful execution of anarchists in Chicago, radicalized her against the state and capitalism. She was also a prolific writer, and poet, publishing dozens of essays and poems in her short life.
Thirty spokes converge on a hub
but it’s the emptiness
that makes a wheel work
pots are fashioned from clay
but it’s the hollow
that makes a pot work
windows and doors are carved for a house
but it’s the spaces
that make a house work
existence makes a thing useful
but nonexistence makes it work.
— Lao-tzu from ‘Taoteching: With Selected Commentaries from the Past 2,000 Years’, tr. from Chinese by Red Pine