I smoke marijuana to return
to the level of the stones —
or if not their splendid
geological history
at least the surrounding
shrubs and grasses
dancing in place —
and that was the only secret
to his music —
the real Orphics
weren’t so quick to imagine
a way out of the world —
as the story has it
this is it
for Norman Finkelstein
“Orpheus Again’” from THE OREGON TRAIL: by Joe Safdie.
Published by Spuyten Duyvil on May 21st, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by Joe Safdie.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Joe Safdie’s latest book of poems is The Oregon Trail (Spuyten Duyvil); his book of essays, Poetry and Heresy, will be published in 2023 by MadHat Press. Previous books and their publishers include Mary Shelley’s Surfboard (Blue Press, 2008), Scholarship (BlazeVox, 2014) and Coastal Zone (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). His own trail to Oregon included stops in California (most recently in San Diego, where he taught English Literature and Creative Writing), Colorado (Boulder), Washington (Seattle) and the Czech Republic (Olomouc and Prague): now in Portland, he’s studying the language of trees. His talk on Charles Olson & Brooks Adams for the American Literature Association is available on YouTube, and he’ll give a talk on William Blake for the Centre for Myth, Cosmology & The Sacred on June 7. Other poems, essays, and reviews can be found in Jacket, Jacket2, Caesura, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars and many other journals and periodicals.
"Like the Oregon Trail that was American colonialism’s highway to heaven, Safdie’s Oregon Trail also journeys into a strange new land. Leading into and through an ordinary world of this and that, it insists on opening into further and further complexities of observation, learning, and thinking, a wagon full of a life’s dedication to knowledge as gnosis, the kind you can’t 'see' as Charles Olson has it, but that animates the world."
—Michael Boughn
"If the smile evolved from fear, these poems are pulling back the lips of artifice and baring the teeth of our souls. The laughter coming out is blunt life and sharp death, humans being dumb and being smart enough to find it funny. Be afraid of these words and read them courageously—Safdie understands that language is the words using you as the joke."
—MTC Cronin
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