Politics as a Profession, Says Max Weber

Poems are useless for governing the world,
says Huang Tingjian, whose poems are miraculous when they succeed.
If doing one thing is better than doing another, if they are both done well,
is doing something like that one better than doing something like that other?
Can’t I say that in fewer words?
After all a poem shouldn’t be wasteful.
But now I come to the more important problem:
settling for something that is like that better one because it is like that better one?
Now and then I act as if I can do something well, says Su Dongpo,
like something I need to start over again at once.

 

First This, Then That

              Both shoes?
You take off a shoe
              when a woman comes to visit
and you don’t want to marry her.

              First silence, then explanation;
first clear, then surprising;
              first the right shoe, then the left shoe,
then the left sock, then the right sock.

Is there anyone who wouldn’t want to write a poem about that?
There is something else I mustn’t forget to do, but I don’t need to think about it now.

‘A poem must say something that is true, in the same way that a scientific article makes true assertions. And, similarly, these assertions must not be trivial, they should appeal to the emotions of the reader.’
– Nachoem M. Wijnberg in an interview

This selection introduces a major poet who is also a business studies professor, a combination which may explain his vigorous questioning of human values in poetry which asks ‘What is worthwhile?’ His poems are characterized by simplicity and clarity, narrative and reasoning: he claims they ‘at least promise to be about the important things in everyone’s life.’

Nachoem M. Wijnberg has said of his collection The Life Of (strongly represented in this selection) that ‘many of the poems have a surface layer with a narrative structure and in the ones that don’t, there’s a structure in the form of a line of reasoning. Of course, some connections are made by association (name a poem that doesn’t do that), but in these poems those links are completely subordinate to the stories and reasoning. There’s no “post-modern” cut and paste and alienation is the last thing I’m trying to achieve – the world is strange enough as it is and my poems aim to help in dealing with that strangeness by bringing it closer and, as far as that’s possible, understanding it.’