Rainer Brambach for president

I know, who's going to vote for a man who has a name like the name of Rainer Brambach, much less for a poet marked by his disregard for material values, a profound engagement with the landscape of the upper Rhine, and a lasting commitment to humanity?

It won't happen here, two things legislate against it: Brombach's Swiss and he died in 1983.

But couldn't we use and don't we need a man – or for that matter a woman – who could write a poem like this ,or at least read a poem and rejoice that it had been written:

'Not wanting to be part of it sometimes
making off into the underwood
past many a silly cow–
Then, lying in the elder shade, timeless,
not giving a damn
if one and one are three.'

Well yes, you say, I'd vote for this man! And why can't there be more people in the world like Rainer Brambach, a man more or less happy with doing nothing, we all might ask? But the are not more people like this, and there are less every day.

I place my faith in a man like Rainer Brambach, poet, laborer, harmless, sweet natured miscreant, the one who falls asleep under trees, not that there are many like him.

* The Collected Poems of Rainier Brambach, translated by Esther Kinsky, Seagull Books, 2014