Cancel me not

A call to build more bridges in issue #182 of your weekly poetry shot

AI-generated image of an iPod Classic on a table in a café

Sing a song
for me Frans. I'd love that.
Leave your current politics out though,
and find middle ground in
The Land Of.

This time, on my way to Paris, I decided to go old-school. I charged my iPod Classic, stuck in it my jacket pocket, white earphones plugged in and pressed play on my old favourites playlist. It worked perfectly, just as I had used it always on my daily commutes 15 years ago. In Paris. Song after song brought me joy. Even the one by that artist, who got lost down a rabbit hole during the Corona pandemic. He was completely lost in a web of conspiracies, and talked about it in his popular podcast, spreading questionable theories. So questionable, that, as it happens these days, he got cancelled. It would have been easy for me to press that skip-to-next-song button on the click wheel. But I didn’t. Art, poetry, and more precisely my poetry, is, I firmly believe, a wonderful tool for us humans to share our visions of and for the world with others. Not to force them on others, but to show our way of seeing things. Art, poetry, and more precisely my poetry, should build bridges, not drive people further apart. I don’t cancel. I might not agree, but I rather find the things that connect us and focus on that. Or simply listen to what you think, and tell you what I think. The beauty of humanity is that we can disagree. Cancelling others, dehumanising others, it only makes the challenges in our world harder to overcome. So, despite his lostness, I still listened to Frans. Not to the song that asks him to sing a song. That one didn’t exist yet in the time of the iPod classic. But to the song about his country, his land, my land. Sing me a song, Frans.

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Poésie de la vie

We recently visited a butterfly garden, and one as big as a hand landed on my daughter’s head. Find the poetry of butterflies in this beautifully shot video.

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Poetry elsewhere

Some poets know how to take you by the hand and transport you to a different place in time and space. I’m always transported by the words of

Joe Triton Schmidt

, to a place that I really enjoy being. And sometimes to a person as well. In this case, a traveller reading a map on a hike. Enjoy The Tao of Maps:

The Tao of Maps

Translation is difficult. Maybe especially the translation of poetry. I learned from this poem that in Italy they say ‘to translate is to betray’. If you combine that with dadaist-inspired absurdist poetry, you can come to an amazing work. Poets Andrea Paoli and Kalen Iwamoto, together with Julien Silvano created this wonderful piece of art, where an original Italian poem by Andrea is homophonically translated by Kalen and underscored by Julien. Take your time to explore and enjoy [Re]belle infidele.

What comes after this life? We won’t really know until we get there. But we can imagine it. And we can keep the memory of our friends alive by remembering them. This beautiful poem To Eternity by

Bob Metivier

is an exploration of what comes after, and by using the form that he did, he honours a poet who not so long ago went to find out what comes after this life. It’s a great way to keep our memory of him, for lack of a better word, alive. Enjoy To Eternity, by Bob Metivier:

To Eternity