Fortuitous Poem by Margaret Drabble

England's not a bad country.

It's just a mean,
Cold,
Ugly,
Divided,
Tired,
Clapped-out post-imperial post-industrial slag-heap
covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons.

It's not a bad country at all.

I love it.

Two Hungarian Refugees

Mid-century, in London,
Two Hungarian refugees,
Discovered they both
Loved Attila Jozsef
The great poet
Of their lonely land.

The discovery’s
Inevitable consequesce
Wasn’t hard to foresee:
The refugees set out
To translate their compatriot’s
Works into English.

First they fought over
Who would write
The introduction and
Who would translate;
In the end, there were
Two introductions and
Enough poems for
a small book.

They decided that Auden WH
Should be brought into the project;
They read in a paper that Auden
Was appointed professor at Oxford.
They call the university
And kept asking for Auden,
Spelling his name
Over and over again.
But their Hungarian accents
Proved too much for
Oxford porters.

They persisted and found Auden
And showed him the poems
And asked if they conveyed
The impression that their author
Was the great poetic genius of the century.
Auden was very polite and replied:
“They do not.”

Poet’s End

What was worse,
His grinding poverty
Or his growing schizophrenia?

For him, it was the disease
(Though his mother
Died of poverty).

He was obsessed by trains;
Staying in the country with his sister
He run after one slow cargo train.

He caught up and decided
He needed to let the train
Take his right arm.

He was clumsy;
After offering his arm
He got hit in the head.

He got killed.
His arm was found
Far away from his body.

At home they found a shirt
With the right sleeve cut off.
His name was Attila Jozsef.

Fortuitous Poem by Michael Scammell

Hungarian in his temper,
German in his industry,
Jewish in his intellectual ambition,
He was never comfortable in his own skin,
Doomed to oscillate between arrogance and humility,
Like one of those mercurial Russians
In the novels of Dostoevsky,
Whom Koestler so admired
And wished to emulate.

Fortuitous Poem by Matt Ridley

To my generation,

It is a dull utility,

As inevitable,

Ubiquitous,

And mundane

As water or air.

Its pylons and wires are ugly,

Its plugs tiresome,

Its failures infuriating,

Its fire risk frightening,

Its bills annoying,

And its power stations,

Monstrous symbols,

Of man-made climate change,

(Complete with Al Gore hurricanes

Coming from their stacks)

But try to see its magic.

Try to see it through the eyes

Of someone who has never known

Power that was invisible and weightless,

That could be transmitted miles through a slender wire

That can do almost anything,

From lighting to toasting,

From propulsion to music playing.

Two billion people

Alive today,

Have never turned on

A light switch.

Blueberry Cake

A sale on blueberries

At the local supermarket

Made me overbuy and search

For ways to use them up. 

At the age of 62

I baked my first (Internet recipe)

Sour cream blueberry cake;

Came out ok, though a bit too sweet. 

Many years ago,

I was elected by my mother

To visit once a month

An old friend of hers in a nursing home. 

I didn’t mind—it was

A chance to leave the apartment,

Take tramways, smoke cigarettes,

And eat a blueberry cake Miss Zofia baked. 

She had curly gray hair,

And thick eyeglasses;

She never complained and

Was always happy to see me. 

When things got bad

And my family got ready to leave

I came to say “good bye”—

The cake didn’t taste that well. 

Miss Zofia was philosophical: 

“Here at the home they notice,

‘A Jewess’, ‘doesn’t go to church’,

There it would be a synagogue

And I’d be a communist.”

Fortuitous Poem by Nikolai Gogol

After the trip he had made,
He felt great fatigue.

Having asked for a very light supper,
Consisting only of suckling pig,
He straightaway got undressed and,
Slipping under the blanket,
Felt asleep soundly, deeply,
Felt asleep in the wondrous way
That they alone sleep
Who are so fortunate
As to know nothing of
Hemorrhoids,
Or fleas,
Or overly powerful mental abilities.

Seacocks—The Unsung Heroes

I spent the morning
Reading political blogs—
Written by angry people
Calling each other
Loathsome names.

I’m not proud of it;
Shamed, if anything¸
But the thing is that
Once I start, I can’t stop.

But I had a medical appointment
And had to stop and go and pay
Tribute to the medical profession
By waiting my time in a small room
Full of old magazines.

“Wooden Boats—The Magazine
For Wooden Boat Owners, Builders and Designers”
Was left behind on a seat next to mine.

The cover story was on seacocks--
The unsung heroes of watertight integrity.

I have never heard of seacocks
But watertight integrity
Sounded important
And so I started to read.

You see, the seacocks are the valves
That can stem the flow of raw water
In through-hull fittings.

I didn’t know about through—hull fittings
But come to think about it
Since they go through the hull
Everyone would agree that
That you should have seacocks to
To keep the boat from sinking.

What a luxury:
A real problem
With a simple solution.

Homer’s Mistakes in “Odyssey”

From an autobiography of a Polish writer,
An anecdote about a friend of his
Who, after the partition of Poland in 1939
Between the Nazi Germany and Soviet Union,
Found himself in a Soviet prison in Lvov.

The cell was full of Ukrainians,
Some nationalists, some criminals,
Who first robed the lone Pole of his
Middle-class, lice-free clothes
And then demanded that he tell them stories
To keep them from fighting each other.

And so, over several days, the story was told:
Of “When the king of an island called Ithaca
Was abroad besieging a big city on the coast
Of Asia Minor called Troy…” and when he finished,
He was told to repeat the story all over again
But this time slowly and without mistakes.

Clearly, King Odys was Ukrainian
And Scylla and Charybdis did not live near Italy
But in the waterfalls and rapids of the river Dnieper
And surely there must have been some
Traitorous Stalinist Russians
Among those who wanted to fuck King Odys’s wife.

Central Committee Christmas Tree

After '56,
When the Party decided to draw a line
Behind its Stalinist past,
It rehabilitated some of its victims,
Expelled some its judicial murderers,
And undertook to strengthen its links
With the working class;
It also allowed a Christmas tree
In the Central Committee building.

Comrades explained that
The Catholic Church remained
A reactionary force allied
With imperialist and revanchist circles
And that the tree wasn't even Christian
Having originated in pagan times.

Connoisseurs of irony enjoyed the spectacle
Of a soi-disant progressive party
Reaching out to pagan beliefs.

Cynics recognized the claim
That the Church stole it from the pagans
And the Party will steal from the Church.

Fortuitous Poem by Arthur Schopenhauer

Sleep is the interest
We have to pay
On the capital
Which is called in
At death;

And the higher the rate of interest
And the more regularly it is paid,
The further the date of redemption
Is postponed.

Fortuitous Poem by John Leonard

When his battery’s charged,
Mailer windmills from one paragraph to the next—
Baroque, anal, Talmudic, olfactory, portentous, loopy, coy, Egyptian;
Down and dirty in the cancer; the aspirin or the plastic;
Shooting moons on sheer vapor;
Blitzed by paranoia and retreating for a screen pass,
As if bitten in the pineal gland by a deranged Swinburne,
With metaphors so meaning--moistened that they stick to our thumbs,
With “intellections” (as he once put it) slapped on like “adhesive plasters”.

When he chooses to, he also speaks in tongues.
Harlot sounds like Whittaker Chambers.
Modene Murphy sounds like Lauren Bacall.
Bill Harvey sounds like L. Ron Hubbard or Lyndon LaRouche.
The guilt—ridden Uruguayan double agent Chevi Fuentes sounds like Franz Fanon or Octavio Paz.
Harry sounds like Rousseau’s Emile when he isn’t sounding like Wilhelm Reich,
And Kittredge sounds like Flaubert’s Salammbo when she isn’t sounding like Hannah Arendt,
And together they all sound like Nichols and May.
And everybody sounds like Mailer, as if picking quasar signals Sirius
The Dog Star through a plate in the head;
As if bodies, vegetables and objects all had distinct vibrations,
Special stinks and personal divinities, angels in the meatloaf, demons in the Tupperware.
Even money comes ‘in all kinds of emotional flavors.’
Ghosts! Pirates! Indians! Animism! Alchemy!
You either like this stuff or you don’t
And I do.

Fortuitous Poem by Woody Allen

I broke up with this girl, and they put me with a psychiatrist who said:
"Why did you get so depressed, and do all those things you did?"
I said, "I wanted this girl and she left me."
And he said, "Well, we have to look into that."
And I said, "There's nothing to look into. I wanted her and she left me."
And he said, "Well, why are you feeling so intense?"
And I said, "Cause I want the girl."
And he said, "What's underneath it?"
And I said, "Nothing."
He said, "I'll have to give you medication."
I said, "I don't want medication. I want the girl."
And he said, "We have to work this through."
So, at that point, I took a fire extinguisher from the casement and struck him across the back of his neck.

Fortuitous Poem by Jonathan Gould

At the same time,
From its frenzied, inchoate beginnings in Britain and the United States,
The great upsurge of adolescent fervor that the press called Beatlemania
Would coalesce into one of the main tributaries
Of a broad confluence of pop enthusiasm, student activism, and mass bohemianism
That would flood the political, social, and cultural landscape
Of much of the industrialized world during the second half of the 1960s,
Spinning off whorls and eddies—
The woman movement,
The gay liberation movement,
The environmental movement—
In its wake.

Fortuitous Poem by John Lennon

Many people ask what are Beatles?
Why Beatles?
Ugh, Beatles, how did the name arrive?
So we will tell you.
It came in a vision—
A man appeared on a flaming pie
And said unto them,
“From this day forward you are Beatles, with an A.”
Thank you Mister Man, they said, thanking him.
And then a man with a beard cut off said—
Will you go to Germany (Hamburg)
And play mighty rock for the peasants for money?
And we said we would play mighty anything for money.

Fortuitous Poem by Leon Trotsky

The October Revolution found
My father a very prosperous man.

At the height of the civil war
Which raged with especial fury in the South
And was accompanied by constant changes of government,
The old man of seventy
Was obliged to walk hundreds of miles
To find shelter in Odessa.

The Reds were a menace to him because he was rich;
The Whites persecuted him because he was my father.

He had lost all his savings in the Revolution.

My father died of typhus in the spring of 1922,
At the very moment when I was reading my report
At the Fourth Congress of the Communist International.

Fortuitous Poem by Steven Weinberg, II

The effort to understand the universe
Is one of the very few things
That lifts human life
A little above the level of farce,
And gives it some of the grace of tragedy

Fortuitous Poem by Steven Weinberg

In its essentials,
This point of view
Has survived
To the present day
And forms the central dogma
Of quantum field theory:
The essential reality
Is a set of fields
Subject to the rules
Of special relativity
And quantum mechanics;
All else is derived
As a consequence
Of quantum dynamics
Of these fields.

Choosing His Terms

In the summer of 1943
In Western Kazakhstan
He run away from
The construction project
Where he was a prisoner
To join a combat unit.

It was death either way
But on different terms:
Storming a reinforced position
Or walking across a minefield
Versus getting typhus
And being left to die like a dog.

Fortuitous Poem by Gottfried Leibnitz

There is an infinite number of possible universes,
And, as only one of them can be actual,
There must be sufficient reason for the choice of God
Which leads Him to decide upon one rather than another

Fortuitous Poem by Isaiah Berlin on Alexander Herzen

He believed that the ultimate goal of life was life itself;
That the day and the hour were ends in themselves,
Not a means to another day or another experience.
He believed that remote ends were a dream,
That faith in them was a fatal illusion;
That to sacrifice the present,
Or the immediate and foreseeable future
To these distant ends
Must always lead to cruel and futile forms
Of human sacrifice.

He believed that values were not found in an impersonal, objective realm
But were created by human beings
Changed with the generation of men
But were nonetheless binding
Upon those who lived in their light;
That suffering was inescapable
And infallible knowledge neither attainable nor needed.

He believed in reason, scientific methods, individual action, empirically discovered truths;
But he tended to suspect that faith in general formulae, laws, prescriptions in human affairs
Was an attempt, sometimes catastrophic, always irrational,
To escape from the uncertainty and unpredictable variety of life
To the false security of our symmetrical fantasies.

He was fully conscious of what he believed.

Fortuitous Poem by Lewis Thomas

I used to stumble my way through the Florio translation,
Hard going because of the antique language
But worth all the trouble nonetheless,
Until Donald Frame version in American English came out,
And I was off and running.

It became my habit to turn the top corner of any page
On which something so remarkable was written
That I knew I would want to find it again.
(I have a poor memory and need to do this sort of thing.)

Now, eight years or so later,
More than half the corners are turned
So the book looks twice as thick sitting on the table
And I have discovered a new interest in Montaigne:
What is there on all those unturned pages
That I have read but forgotten,
Still there to be discovered.

Fortuitous Poem by Arrian

No matter who I am that make this claim.

I need not declare my name-
Though it is by no mean unheard of in the world;
I need not specify my country and family,
Or any official position I may have held.
Rather let me say this:
That this book of mine is,
And has been from my youth,
More precious than country and kin and public advancement-
Indeed, for me it is these things

Mukka Express

Mukka Express Stovetop Latte Maker:
Water goes underneath,
Then coffee in a filter
Then milk on top
And after a few minutes’ waiting
A dark, narrow, intense,
Jet of coffee will shot into the milk
Where it will turn into curlicues
Before hitting the metal side
And disappearing into the browning milk.
And you will be stuck between
Admiring the beauty of what’s just happened
And reflecting about the lessons you have just been taught
About entropy and the Second Law,
About chaos and turbulence,
About civilizations settling near rivers,
And about languages, starting pure in antiquity,
Before getting mixed-up with whatever was around
And coming to us ready to be sipped.

Fortuitous Poem by Barry Mazur

The first time
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Opened Kafka’s The Metamorphosis,
He was a teenager,
Reclining on a couch.
Upon reading

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect…..

Garcia Marquez fell off his couch
Astonished by his revelation
That you were allowed
To write like that.

Fortuitous Poem by Karl Kraus

I divide the people I don’t greet into four groups.

There are those whom I don’t greet in order not to compromise myself
This is the simplest group.

Next, there are those whom I don’t greet in order not to compromise them.
This requires a certain amount of attention.

But then there are those whom I don’t greet in order not to get into their bad books.
They are even harder to deal with.

And, finally, there are those whom I don’t greet in order not to get into my bad books.
This takes a particular amount of concentration.

But I’ve had quite a bit of practice, and by my manner of not greeting people I manage to express each of those nuances in such a way that no injustice is done to anyone.

Fortuitous Poem by Patrick Melrose

How could he ever hope to give up drugs?
They filled him with such intense emotion.
The sense of power they gave him was,
Admittedly, rather subjective
(Ruling the world from under the bedcovers,
Until the milkman arrived
And you thought he was a platoon of stormtroopers
Come to steal your drugs
And splatter your brains across the wall),
But then again life was so subjective.

Fortuitous Poem by Vladimir Nabokov

Summer soomerki—the lovely Russian phrase for dusk.
Time: a dim point in the first decade of this unpopular century.
Place: latitude 59 degrees north from your equator, longitude 100 degrees east from my writing hand.

The day would take hours to fade,
And everything—sky, tall flowers, still water—
Would be kept in a state of infinite vesperal suspense
Deepened rather than resolved
By a doleful moo of a cow in a distant meadow
Or by the still more moving cry that came from some bird
Beyond the lower course of the river,
Where the vast expanse of a misty-blue sphagnum bog,
Because of its mystery and remoteness,
The children had baptized America.

Fortuitous Poem by Jorge Luis Borges

Berkeley affirmed the continuous existence of objects,
Insomuch when no individual perceives them, God does.

Hume, with greater logic, denied this existence.

Berkeley affirmed personal identity, “for I myself am not my ideas,
But somewhat else, a thinking, acting principle that perceives.”

Hume, the skeptic, refuted this belief, and made each man “a bundle or collection
Of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity.”

Both men affirmed the existence of time:

For Berkeley it is “the succession of ideas in my mind,
Flowing uniformly and participated in by all beings.”

For Hume, it is “a succession of indivisible moments.”


(From A New Refutation of Time)

Fortuitous Poem by Dan Savage

Sex is so powerful;
Sex is half a billion years older than us.

This idea that we have sex is bullshit
Sex has us.

Fortuitous Poem by Ira Glass

Anybody can have sex in New York City
Every night of the week;

All they have to do
Is willing to stay in a bar
Unbtil 4 am
And lower their standards.

Fortuitous Poem by Joseph Brodsky, II

When a writer resorts to a language
Other than his mother tongue
He does it so either out of necessity , like Conrad
Or burning ambition, like Nabokov,
Or of the sake of greater estrangement, like Beckett.

Belonging to a different league,
In the summer of 1977,
In New York,
After living in this country for five years,
I purchased in a small typewriter shop
On Sixth Avenue a portable “Lettera 22”
And set out to write
(essays, translations, occasionally a poem)
In English for a reason that had very little to do with the above.

My sole purpose then, as it is now
Was to myself in closer proximity
To the man whom I considered
The greatest mind of the twentieth century:
Wystan Hugh Austen.

Fortuitous Poem by Joseph Brodsky

Of the eighty-one years of her life,
Nadezhda Mandelshtam
Spent nineteen as the wife
Of Russia’s greatest poet in this century
And forty-two as his widow.

The rest was childhood and youth.

In educated circles,
Especially among the literati,
Being the widow of a great man
Is enough to provide an identity.

This is especially so in Russia,
Where in the thirties and forties
The regime was producing writers’ widows
With such efficiency, that in the middle of the sixties
There were enough of them around
To organize a trade union.

Fortuitous Poem by Leszek Kolakowski, II

The Nazis told their supermen
To read the Will to Power,
And it is no good saying
That it was a mere chance,
And that they might have equally well
Have chosen the Critique of Practical Reason.

It is not a question of establishing
The guilt of Nietzsche, who as an individual
Was not responsible for the use of his writing;
Nevertheless, the fact that they were so used
Is bound to cause alarm and cannot be dismissed
As irrelevant to the understanding of what was in his mind.

St. Paul was not personally responsible for the Inquisition
And for the Roman Church at the end of the fifteen century,
But the inquirer, whether Christian or not, cannot be content
To observe that Christianity was depraved or distorted
By the conduct of unworthy popes and bishops;
He must rather seek to discover what it was in the Pauline epistles
That gave rise, in the fullness of time, to unworthy and criminal actions.

Our attitude to the problem of Marx and Marxism should be the same
And in this sense the present study is not only a historical account
But an attempt to analyze the strange fate of an idea
Which began in Promethean humanism and culminated in the monstrous tyranny of Stalin.

Fortuitous Poem by Karl Marx

The mode of production
In material life
Determines
The social,
Political,
And intellectual life processes
In general.

It is not the consciousness of men
That determines their being,
But, on the contrary,
Their social being that
Determines their consciousness.

Fortuitous Poem by Milan Kundera

Since there is no single historical event
We can count on being commonly known,
I must speak of events that took place
A few years ago as if there were a thousand years old:

In 1939, the German army entered Bohemia
And the Czech state ceased to exist.

In 1945 the Russian army entered Bohemia
And the country, one again, was called an independent republic.

The people were enthusiastic about the Russia that had driven out the Germans
And seeing in the Czech Communist Party its faithful arm, they became sympathetic to it.

So the Communists took power in February 1948
With neither bloodshed nor violence,
But greeted by the cheers of about half the nation.

And now, please note:
The half that did the cheering
Was the more dynamic,
The more intelligent,
The better.

Fortuitous Poem by Mikhail Bulgakov

Wearing a white cloak
With blood-red lining,
Walking with the shuffling gait
Of a veteran cavalry-men,
In the early morning
Of the fourteenth day
Of the spring month of Nissan,
Into the covered colonnade
Between the two wings
Of the palace of Herod the Great,
Came out the Procurator of Judea
Pontius Pilate.

Fortuitous Poem by Mary Robinson

A rest might be an idea.

There is too much eating
There is altogether too much sex, dancing, carousing, reveling.
All of it goes for far too long.
There is powdered sugar dust on everything.
There are twinkle lights burning every day of the year.
Funerals, Jell-O shots, fishing, swearing, barbecues
Back-door gigs, vats and vats of jambalaya.
There are too many houses and sidewalks
Disappearing under weeds and vines
And in yards that look impenetrable,
Too many neon signs, too much on-the-stoop drinking,
Corruption, and Technicolor clothes,
Too much Crawfish shucking,
And Catholic everything, too much stale beer,
Too many heroin junkies shooting up on the balconies,
Too many big houses and trees snapped off,
Too many steel billboards bent to the ground,
Too much Andouille sausage, and second lines,
Too much money, and debauch, and cars parked all crooked.

Fortuitous Poem by Michel Houellebecq (trans. by Gavin Bowd), II

The project had a historical relevance,
It was quite an accurate reflection
Of the art world at a given time.

There was indeed,
A sort of dividing up;

On the one hand,
Fun, sex, kitsch, and innocence;
On the other,
Trash, death and cynicism.

Fortuitous Poem by Michel Houellenbecq (trans. by Gavin Bowd)

They celebrated the event at Chez Anthony and Georges…

The restaurateurs like celebs…
And the celebs, in general, love restaurants;

Olga opted for a gazpacho a l’arugula and semi-cooked lobster with yam mash,
Jed for pan-seared scallops and baby-turbot and caraway soufflé with its Passe-Crassane pear emulsion.

Anthony came to join them for dessert
Wearing his kitchen apron
And brandishing a bottle of Bas-Armagnac Castarede 1905.

The finale of prune and rancio
Was the typical example
Of a mature eau de vie
Long on the finish,
With a note of fine old leather at the last…

Olga breathed in at length
And with delectation,
The bouquet of the Armagnac,
Before wetting her lips.

She was adopting marvelously
Well to France,
It was difficult to believe that she had spent her childhood
In a block of flats in a Moscow suburbs.

“How is it that the new chefs,” she asked after her first sip—
“I mean the chefs who get talked about—
Are almost all homosexuals?”

Fortuitous Poetry by Wilfrid Sheed, II

Music is not produced
By whole groups,
But by one genius at a time,
And it may be significant
That the two families
That gave us
Irving Berlin and George Gershin
Both fled Russia
On the same great wave
Of czarist pogroms,
Only to find American black people
Not only singing
About a similar experience,
But using a Hebrew Bible
As their text.