Read Like A Poet

Featuring Nâzim Hikmet

Photo by Andrey Svistunov on Unsplash

Welcome to Office Hours. My name is José Olivarez. If you’re new here: bienvenidos. If you’ve been here: bienvenidos. Thank you either way.

This portion of the program is called Read Like A Poet. If you’re reading this, I assume it’s because you are curious about poetry, or are a writer. I hope this series offers you insights into your own reading practice.

The other portion of this program is called Office Hours. Office Hours is an invitation to come hang out via zoom and ask questions about reading, writing, or publishing. This week Office Hours will be tomorrow, Wednesday, June 18th from 7pm EST-8pm EST. Here is the link to the zoom.

Here is today’s poem: On Living by Nâzim Hikmet.

I

Living is no laughing matter:
	you must live with great seriousness
		like a squirrel, for example—
   I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
		I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
	you must take it seriously,
	so much so and to such a degree
   that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                                            your back to the wall,
   or else in a laboratory
	in your white coat and safety glasses,
	you can die for people—
   even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
   even though you know living
	is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
   that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees—
   and not for your children, either,
   but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
   because living, I mean, weighs heavier.
II

Let’s say we’re seriously ill, need surgery—
which is to say we might not get up
			from the white table.
Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad
			about going a little too soon,
we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we’ll look out the window to see if it’s raining,
or still wait anxiously
		for the latest newscast. . . 
Let’s say we’re at the front—
	for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
	we might fall on our face, dead.
We’ll know this with a curious anger,
        but we’ll still worry ourselves to death
        about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let’s say we’re in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
                        before the iron doors will open.
We’ll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
                                I  mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
        we must live as if we will never die.
III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
               and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
	  I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even 
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
	  in pitch-black space . . . 
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
                               if you’re going to say “I lived”. . .

I didn’t want to choose this poem today, but I kept coming back to it. It kept rising to the top of my attention, past all the other poems I was looking at. Maybe you know it. Maybe you think of Aracelis Girmay’s On Kindness.

For me, I think about my friend, Jovanny. When we were in high school, Jovanny told me something to the effect of “just because you’re breathing doesn’t mean you’re alive.” I never forgot it. What does it mean to live? How do you go beyond breath? What must you do to really live?

When I go to poetry, I don’t go for answers. I go for moments of beauty, for moments when poets find language that gets close to some feeling sailing on the lake of my soul, for emotion, for play, for an opportunity to live in language and experience something real. All of those experiences might teach me. They might make me laugh. They might make me cry. The great poems all move me. I carry them with me.

How do we write great poems? I don’t know. Great poems possess a bit (or a lot) of magic. There is something to them that is beyond explanation. Hikmet’s “On Living” is a great poem. When I read it, it calls to mind these lines by Angela Jackson: “Some places you could die in,/ if you could just go on/ living there.” In both poems, death is present, and the writers turn towards life. Perhaps today’s poem also calls up last week’s poem: “Who Understands Me but Me” by Jimmy Santiago Baca. In both Baca and Hikmet’s poems there is an insistence on life.

My favorite lines in Hikmet’s poem are the first three: “Living is no laughing matter:/ you must live with great seriousness/ like a squirrel, for example.” I love the surprise that a squirrel is the first example we are given to understand what it means to live with great seriousness. I do not take squirrels seriously. I am delighted by them. Their appearance in this poem does not change my mind about them, but surprises me nonetheless.

I notice the movement from section II to section III. In section II, the writer grapples with knowing they will die and “we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told.” It is a personal death in this section. In Section III, it is a planetary death. To know that not only will we die, but everything else on this planet will one day cease, too. Hikmet offers that “You must grieve for this right now/—you have to feel this sorrow now—/ for the world must be loved this much/ if you’re going to say “I lived”…” To live is not to ignore pain, war, suffering and the like—it is to know that such pain is unavoidable. To face these truths and mourn their meaning. And to accept joy and laughter anyway. Not just to accept it, but to indulge in it. To savor it. To know that it will not last and choose life anyway.

Maybe the squirrels are right.

Thank you for reading. See you tomorrow on zoom for Office Hours and next week for the next poem and micro essay.