Skip to main content

Poetry Focus: Tao Lin

Eyewear is very pleased to welcome Tao Lin (sort of pictured) the significant American writer and poet, this vaguely snowy Saturday in London, as part of our ongoing series featuring American Poets all British poets and poetry readers should know about.

Tao Lin is one of the key 21st century poets singled out for attention in the last chapter of Jennifer Ashton's edited collection, The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry Since 1945 (2013). Tao Lin is the author of seven books of fiction/poetry. His third novel, Taipei, will be published early Jun 2013 by Vintage. He may be followed on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/tao_lin

i saw you on the street

i went away

i saw other things

i went away some more

it rained

it did something else

it did almost all the rest of it

it was a thing too and it wanted to happen

‘i am bored,’ it said

‘tao,’ it said

i went away from it

i got away and stood there

somewhere

i don’t know

there was nothing to do

i was far away from things

but things were everywhere

and i was a thing anyway

a thousand pages of reasons said i was just a thing

every reason was good and supported by footnotes

the font was huge but on each successive page the font got smaller

‘it would take a long time to refute all that,’ i said

i sat down

it was raining

every five minutes the thing nearest me changed into a mistake and disappeared

sometimes a beach ball came from the darkness and i hit it back into the darkness

after a while someone turned on all the lights

i was in a bright room

everyone was there

the person who i threw cherry tomatoes at the library with from a balcony across the street in college was there

someone in back was saying, ‘i think i would almost rather be unsuccessful and unhappy than successful and happy’

cake was coming

a human who looked trustworthy said that you were looking for me

and gave me a beer

i cried

something good was about to happen

i cried and the crying made me sad









loneliness is just a word that means you are feeling alone and depressed and starting to think about how difficult and strangely impossible it is for you to be interested in the same people who are interested in you and how if you don’t change your worldview and personality soon then you will probably always feel alone and depressed because you can’t remember a time when you haven’t felt alone and depressed but really you can and that is when you were a small child but that small child seems like a different person, really, than who you are right now and you can’t become a different person anymore because you are over twenty years old and people this age don’t change unless they fall off a barn and get a long metal rod through their brain and then they change drastically and get studied by scientists and never have to get a real job again but always look very alone and far away and doomed on TV even if they and all their friends and family and an international team of doctors, neural surgeons, and psychologists—cognitive, behavioral, courtroom, and analytical—say that they aren’t at all

on the internet you say you hate people
i say i hate people a lot more than you do

we are at a restaurant
everyone is talking
i feel sad and frustrated
because that is how i feel when i am around people
i hear you say that you hate people
i say that i hate people way more than you hate people

in the train station you are talking
i move very close to you
i hug you a little while you are telling me something
you laugh and twist away and take my banana and throw it in the trash

on the train i put on sunglasses
i say i wear sunglasses all the time now
you ask why
i say so people can’t see the weakness in my eyes

it is the next night and four in the morning


poem published online with permission of the author; copyright Tao Lin 2013.

Labels:

Comments

Amy Rose Walter said…
That's cool that you got Tao. One time in like 2006 me and my husband had a contest to see who could write a poem most like Tao, and we sent them to him and he judged them for us.
Sun Feb 24, 07:28:00 pm 2013
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart?  A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional.  Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were.  For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ?  Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets.  But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ?  How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular.  John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
3 comments
Read more

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and  Silence of the Lambs .  I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".
1 comment
Read more

THE SWIFT REPORT 2023

I am writing this post without much enthusiasm, but with a sense of duty. This blog will be 20 years old soon, and though I rarely post here anymore, I owe it some attention. Of course in 2023, "Swift" now means one thing only, Taylor Swift, the billionaire musician. Gone are the days when I was asked if I was related to Jonathan Swift. The pre-eminent cultural Swift is now alive and TIME PERSON OF THE YEAR. There is no point in belabouring the obvious with delay: 2023 was a low-point in the low annals of human history - war, invasion, murder, in too many nations. Hate, division, the collapse of what truth is, exacerbated by advances in AI that may or may not prove apocalyptic, while global warming still seems to threaten the near-future safety of humanity. It's been deeply depressing. The world lost some wonderful poets, actors, musicians, and writers this year, as it often does. Two people I knew and admired greatly, Ian Ferrier and Kevin Higgins, poets and organise...
1 comment
Read more