Lit as coping mechanism

"Everything that wishes to remain sacred must surround itself with mystery"--Mallarme.

This Trump situation has me stumped. The best I can do is to think of it as some sort of koan.

"Who says my poems are poems? My poems are not poems. And when you understand my poems are not poems, then we can talk about poetry."--Ryokan, Japanese Buddhist monk, b:1758, d:1831.

I think I have Ryokan right, I'm doing it from memory being out in the woods at the moment, far away from my book of Ryokan.

I really love the Ryokan attitude; I should try it more often. 

Do I seem bitter to you? I seem bitter to myself so often these days. I'm not a writer like Irving Layton (who is?) or for that matter Melville, who could turn the bitter into something brilliant and beautiful.

My bitterness is more a kind of tiredness. I'm tired is all. It's tiring to be politically progressive in this country (and this is, in some ways, the easiest country to be politically progressive in, outside of Sweden or Denmark or some other Nordic country.)

Was it Rolf Jocobsen, the Norwegian poet, who said he wrote for "the tired, the distracted?" I seem to recall him saying this. Jacobsen had a complicated political life.

To be politically progressive in this country is to be constantly put in the position of a critic. It's enough to make one constantly grumpy. Even when a somewhat consoling thought tempts me--for instance, that the way I feel now as a political progressive is the way The Right must have felt when The Left had power--goes in one ear and out the other. The truth is that The Left has never had any real power, certainly not the power The Right ascribed to it, The Right becoming Righter year after year, keeps pushing The Left right. Obama and Clinton are, from this vantage point, Republicans, moderate Republicans perhaps, but Republicans nevertheless.

Karl Marx, certainly the most charming and misunderstood writer I've ever read: "the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point is to change it."

What if poets wore black robes like Supreme Court justices? Would they have more social/political power than they have now? Maybe the point of poetry is to have no power, so that anything can be said and done.

This guy Gorsuch is so disturbing, the good guy who says and does all the right things. I've known types like Gorsuch all my life, they're not what they seem. He seems as illegitimate as Trump, the man who nominated him. 

Can you bandage yourself with a poem?