EDITOR’S NOTE. The following was Jeffrey Robinson’s contribution to the recent Poetry & Revolution conference at Birkbeck College of the University of London. As with other of Robinson’s recent writings, it presents an ongoingly radical view of Romanticism in the spirit of PoemsfortheMillennium, volmue 3, which he and I constructed in the first decade of the current millennium. For my part, the collaboration with Robinson opened me to areas of poetry that had long been hidden from me and honed my own practice in ways that had only been latent until then. If I wrote ABookofConcealments in the process – & I did – the sense of “Romantic Dadas” that appears there was also part of our work in common, for which I remain forever grateful. (J.R.)
The sky is overcast, The stars are darkened, The celestial expanses quiver, The bones of the earth-gods tremble, The planets are stilled, For they have seen the King appearing in power As a god who lives on his fathers And feeds on his mothers; The King is a master of wisdom Whose mother knows not his name. The glory of the King is in the sky, His power is in the horizon Like his father Atum who begot him.
Poems and poetics