Emily Dickinson Is Not Borges
EMILY DICKINSON IS NOT BORGES
Emily Dickinson is not Borges
And Borges is not Kafka
And Kafka is not Dickens
And no one is Shakespeare-
Each one is only one self
Except for those who are many selves
And those who are many selves
Do not know
Who they themselves are-
Lear is not Falstaff
And Falstaff is not Hamlet
And Hamlet is not Shakespeare
And Shakespeare is not Donne-
No one is anyone but themselves
And even those who are really ‘someone'
Are not all the others who also are-
And we who are nothing at all?
What are we?
We are not nothing at all.
We are not great
And no one will remember our names
But we are still here now
Reading Borges and Dickenson and Kafka and Shakespeare
And wondering how and why
There are those in a world of their own
With names of their own
They themselves will never completely know.
poem by Shalom Freedman
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Related quotes
Bellow Can Only Be Bellow
BELLOW CAN BE ONLY BELLOW
Bellow can only be Bellow
Kierkegaard-Kierkegaard
Kafka- Kafka
Joyce- Joyce
Borges- Borges
Pessoa-Pessoa
There is only one of each of us-
And no matter how many pages we write
And how many names we give ourselves and our own characters
No matter how many styles we invent
Each one is only one-
And so this small poem too
Will not be for anyone else
Any more or other
Than so much else
Which has already failed to give me the kind of name
Only the truly great have-.
poem by Shalom Freedman
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I don't want to leave any message, I just advise them to read other authors' stuff and forget me; forget about Borges, there are so many others far superior.
Jorge Luis Borges in interview by Joaquín Soler Serrano (1980), translated by Dan Costinaş
Submitted by Dan Costinaş
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Borges
BORGES
Life is a Story,
An Essay,
A Poem.
Its characters are not real -
Its lines are long,
Its rivers are in you
As you play games
With Time and Identity,
You write
And we see
readings
Never heard before.
Greater more humane writers
have been and will be-
But there is only one Borges.
poem by Shalom Freedman
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In The Manner Of Borges I Write Poems In My Old Age
IN THE MANNER OF BORGES I WRITE POEMS IN MY OLD AGE
In the manner of Borges I write poems in my old age
And dream that they are not only imitations
Of poems written by others
When we all were young.
Instead I go on now in the darkness of the night
Because the fear of what will be
Is always so deep in me
It does not need Poetry or Happiness or any other Meaning
Outside itself.
We are small sands drifting on the edge of stars
Lesser beings of a time we will never know
All that we have done comes back to us over and over again
As if we never were
I don’t believe I will ever write Borges lines
He wrote them in his own imagined words
And I must in my own little life
Suffer to the end of time
All I have not been
And never will be.
God Who is Good
God of Love
You gave me so much
You did not have to give me Poetry also.
poem by Shalom Freedman
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I Take From Wordsworth The Love of Calm Beauty
I TAKE FROM WORDSWORTH THE LOVE OF CALM BEAUTY
I take from Wordsworth the Love of Calm Beauty-
From Coleridge distracted searching for an Idea of it all-
From Borges the Pleasure in stories of Mind-
From Hopkins Alliteration’s passion in Poetry's Despair-
From Dickinson enigmatic perceiving of Infinity not found-
From Shakespeare more than I can name or hear-
From Psalms the God I Need and I Fear.
poem by Shalom Freedman
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There are devotees of Goethe, of the Eddas, of the late song of the Nibelungen; my fate has been Shakespeare. As it still is, though in a way that no one could have foreseen—no one save one man. Daniel Thorpe, who has just recently died in Pretoria. There is another man, too, whose face I have never seen.
Jorge Luis Borges in Shakespeare's Memory (1983), translated by Andrew Hurley
Submitted by Dan Costinaş
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I Am At Home With Kafka
.
I AM AT HOME WITH KAFKA
I am at home with Kafka -
I know his soul
I read it as mine own so many years ago-
His father as my father
And his face as my grandmother's,
Lean and white and long
With its own deep beautiful sadness-
Anxiety is mine-
And fear is mine-
And parable is mine-
And yet
His genius is his and not mine
He is Kafka
And I am only one of many readers-
I am at home with Kafka
I know his soul
But I am not Kafka-
Kafka is a genius of mankind
And I am a little man writing forgettable lines
Still alive
Many long years after the age
The holy genius went to his grave unrecognized.
poem by Shalom Freedman
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I did not seek death but she came along (cavatina sequence)
(after Emily Dickinson)
I did not seek death but she came along,
was visiting
in passing looked at me wearily;
I was shooting,
she was a entrancing, lewd, lascivious
kind of being;
who really did love destruction and war,
she promised to visit me once more.
She said that all of her kisses and bliss
would transport me
into a unknown distant restful place,
eternity
was one of her many vague promises,
from her grasp free
grenades, rockets, shells detonated
while still in vain, with longing, she waited.
["Because I Could Not Stop for Death" by Emily Dickinson.]
poem by Gert Strydom
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With Kafka.
Kafka would have liked
the way you said that.
You kept his books on
the shelf next to those
of Burroughs and Joyce.
You like the painting on
the book’s paper cover.
Paperbacks are cheap
and soon worn out,
Thornton used to say.
He liked hard covered
books, first editions if
he could afford. He said
Kafka was too morbid
for you. You need a lighter
read, he said, something
that doesn’t mess with
your female head. You
take down the Kafka and
read again where you read
before, the whole drama
unfolding, the printed words
bringing a different world,
and ghostly by the window
with steady stare, Franz Kafka
in silence just sitting there.
poem by Terry Collett
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Hypocrisy
You...
You...
You...
You...
You...
You.
You!
Me?
poem by Erica Borges
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Gunnar Thorgilsson
The memory of time
Is full of swords and ships
And the dust of empires
And the rumble of hexameters
And the high horses of war
And shouts and Shakespeare.
I want to recall that kiss, the kiss
You bestowed on me in Iceland.
poem by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Hoyt Rogers
Submitted by Dan Costinaş
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Elegy For Jane Kenyon (2)
Jane is big
with death, Don
sad and kind - Jane
though she's dying
is full of mind
We talk about the table
the little walnut one
how it's like
Emily Dickinson's
But Don says No
Dickinson's
was made of iron. No
said Jane
Of flesh.
poem by Jean Valentine
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Bodies
My energy
Is yours.
I cannot
Escape you.
poem by Erica Borges
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Inferior To You (A Poem To Emily Dickinson)
INFERIOR TO YOU (A POEM TO EMILY DICKINSON)
Inferior to you
And your metaphor-rich mind
I can only pretend
We’re two of a kind.
Dear Emily
I love you,
But after all these years
Nothing will marry us
Save our too mortal fears..
poem by Shalom Freedman
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Literary Envy
LITERARY ENVY
Not Shakespeare
Not Tolstoy
Not Kafka Joyce Proust
Not Keats Yeats Wordsworth
Not Hopkins Dickinson
Not Whitman
Not I.B. Singer
Not Hemingway
Not Bellow
Not even Philip Roth
Updike or Salinger.
Not any of the writers
Whose work I love and admire.
Not even the living names now
Who will cease to be
Names In Time.
Like the great mass of mankind
When I die
I will not be in the Consciousness
Of future generations.
I will not be.
I will be ‘not’.
I
poem by Shalom Freedman
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Beautiful Souls
We know
enough
Beautiful Souls
It is enough!
WINNING!
poem by Erica Borges
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Life itself is a quotation.
quote by Jorge Luis Borges
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Reality is not always probable, or likely.
quote by Jorge Luis Borges
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
quote by Jorge Luis Borges
Submitted by Dan Costinaş
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