Communicate Poem by gershon hepner

Some things cease to have a life
once you write a poem,
or you tell them to you wife,
and you let her know ’em.

Other things can only come
to life if you reveal
to her what, only if you’re dumb,
you may try to conceal.

Throwing flowers that aren’t dead
away is not commu-
nicating with your wife in bed,
and other places too.

Ali Smith writes about the poetry of Sylvia Townsend Warner in the TLS, January 2,2009:

“It has ceased to have life since I wrote a poem about it”, begins one poem; this sums up the tragedy of these works. Much of Ackland’s poetry is a draining experience. It only occasionally raises itself on a kind of wing – often in her poems about birds, which play a large part in the private codified imagery she shared with Warner. But there is no getting over it: the experience of reading a collected Ackland is not a happy one, and the empathetic energy a reader might hope for in the alternative, sadness, is somehow also blocked in Ackland’s poetic, where form and philosophy are both battened down. Her war poetry and her political poetry, on the other hand, have a literalness less spoilt by self-conscious poeticism, and an anger, a plainness and an energy, a hint of some considerable and selfless power, which, in Journey from Winter, is a relief:
I went to throw away the flowers that were not quite dead
And opened the furnace, but the girls burnt alive
Stared back at me with their drained, living faces.
So – Open the door, we will jettison these outside.
(“December Evening,1946”)

1/10/09