Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Part Two by Dave Jaffe

        Arthur Rimbaud - Another Troubled Poet


       There were other poets who led troubled lives.
       Arthur Rimbaud was another poet writing prodigy. "Oh come let us seek absinthe's green coloured halls," wrote the young Rimbaud. Absinthe was a green coloured alcoholic drink that was dangerous to the drinker's health. It was later banned by the French government.
     Rimbaud was French and was born in France in 1854. Before the age of 21 he wrote great poetry in his books called 'Illuminations' and 'The Drunken Boat'. Yet Rimbaud who was one of the founders of modern poetry, never wrote another line of poetry after the age of 20.
    He fled Europe and ended up in Abyssinia or present day Ethiopia. Here he became a businessman, Then he went back to his mother's house in France and died there in 1891. He never made it to the age of 40.
     His short life was full of wanderings and some suffering. Poetry certainly didn't save him from a short and troubled existence.

Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Part Two

'Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health' by Dave Jaffe

   Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health -  Part One


    "Poetry makes nothing happen," wrote the British poet Wystan Hugh Auden. Auden was one of Britain's great 20th century poets. At one time he was a Marxist  and later re-wrote parts of his poetry so as to cut out its political messages.
    Still, W.H. Auden lived into his sixties and writing poetry didn't hurt him.It made him famous and allowed him to write some beautiful verse.
    Others weren't so lucky. Here I'm basically continuing to write about artists, in this case poets, who lived through some tough times. I've done this elsewhere on my blog.
     Emily Nelligan was born in Quebec in 1879. He started to write poetry in French when he was in his teens.But in 1899 he was supposedly hit by a nervous breakdown. he spent the rest of his life in a mental asylum.
    Recent biographers claim that Nelligan's mother put him an asylum because he was gay.Yet whether this was true or not, writing poetry didn't make Nelligan's life a happy one.
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A.M. Klein Was Quite A Guy - A Poem by Dave Jaffe

    A.M. Klein Was Quite A Guy.



A.M. Klein .
Alas, he was no friend of mine.
His high school was Baron Byng.
Soon he learned to sing,
'The Internationale'
And 'The Maple Leaf Forever'.


Before he turned old
He took Bronfman gold.
Yet he wrote as his life unscrolled
For the first time
Many fine poems.


In Montreal he practiced law.
And then he heard or saw
Six million Jews
Who died with their shoes
Sometimes put in neat deadly piles,
By S.S. guards who sometimes smiled,
And then gassed all the Jews
In Hitler's death camps.


Klein wrote a book on Hitler.
He compared mythologies with Leonard Cohen
Jew to Jew.
 And he knew Irving Layton,
And maybe Irving's daughter.


He gave no apprenticeship to Mordecai Richler
Who put him in a novel,
That made him no model
For any young artist.

He was another cursed poet.
"Un maudit poet," as the French say.
He descended into madness
Starting in 1952 or maybe 56.
 In any case there was no fix
Coming from doctors for him.



He emerged from a Jewish womb
And was buried in the tomb
Of poetry anthologies.
So many English language poets
Who were born or lived
In Montreal
Are forgotten there.
Alongside many others who weren't.


Now they all may be forgotten
As an avalanche of French language laws
Could sweep them away once more
Into fading memory.

Yet even now
I say with a sigh
"A.M. Klein, Abraham Moses Klein,
Was quite a guy."








   

Poetry by Dave Jaffe. Poem called "Take A Pill and Head South'.

Take A Pill And Head South



Come.
 Let's sneak away to the sunny south
 Far away from the grey skies.

 You won't have to sit
  In squashed airline seats.
  Or wait for hours
  In long impatient lines
  Of passengers.

  It's really simple.
  At three in the morning
  Swallow half a tylenol and codeine pill.
  Close your eyes
  And you're off.
  Away from winter grey
  That swirls outside
  And inside your head.

  Go away from the rains
  That drip endlessly in your mind.
  Then suddenly
   You're floating
   In tropical skies
   That move past you in homage to your arrival.

   Now you watch
   Afro-Cubans dance
   Churning the air with their energy.
   They dance
   In faded dance halls
   Rimmed with dust
   Or cash filled casino floors in Havana.

   You see
   Parakeets in red and yellow
   Plunge into cobalt blue waters.
   Or they let their feathered wings
   Gently brush the cannabis-dazed beards
   Of grounded Jamaican rastas.

   Palm trees sprout on the borders of beaches.
   Or they bow to you in the wind
   As you walk past them.
    Hotel windows open or move in random creakiness
   Blown back and forth by the blue air.

   Sometimes
   Clouds scurry across the warm sky.
   Or a three course meal
   Churns your stomach.
    But mostly
   You lie on a gentle beach
   And live in warmth and love.

    Your spirits soar
    Like a faraway parrot
    That climbs in its blazing colours
    Into the blue dish of the sky.
    Far far away from pain
    And rain
    And rain.

   


  

Poem by Dave Jaffe 'An Old Man Looks At Love'

        An Old Man Looks At Love


    It cannot be
   That one and one makes three,
   That two and two don't make four.
   Or add up to something more.
   Numbers are mysteries to me,
   Like your brown eyes.


   Your eyes meet mine
   And like moons they shine.
   I look away burned by love.
   But can't give it an endless shove
   Into a future
   I won't control or be in.


   In this food court mall
   I fear moving or a fall.
   Here where I've broken an arm before,
   Crashing on a well tiled floor.
   Now I'm an old man,
   One of many torn

 
   Then stuck in static memories
   Of pain, of loss   and
   Of love.