From time to time
I have these days when
I feel like embarking
on a poem again
of a kind that still isn’t
all that popular. I mean
one without any meta-
physical refinements or
that thing that lately has stood in
for such . . . that type of
cynical genuflecting
at the stilted progress of history
or standing gasping akimbo
in the tough East-West marathon
as if you were one of
Alighieri’s damned
with a sthich. Poems
someone said to me the other day
only attracted him if they
were full of surprises
written at those
odd times when
something still inchoate
a daydream a single
line begins somewhere and
undoes you.
Durs Grünbein
(trans. Michael Hofmann)
