Half True
It's more and more poems these days
Well, this is quickly turning into a poetry newsletter, isn’t it – and specifically (my deepest apologies!) a poetry in which to find the news.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
-William Carlos Williams, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower
I’ve always loved how those lines’ weird syntax keeps things just a little unstable – like his plums, is he being earnest, wry, both?
Who is at fault for this difficulty getting the news from poems – the reader, or the poems? Or the world?
I saw a number of friends this weekend while I was away at a dear friend’s wedding, and I had to admit to them that since having my second child, I have weirdly been writing more than ever. Maybe it’s the thundering and slow (or is it rapid?) onset of fascism in this country, but it’s as if the closing down of time and opportunity with which to use my one life has become more and more hard to ignore.
Poetry is helping me metabolize it all: how bad things are and, simultaneously, how good. The world is full of wonder and beautiful resistance. People are infinite and fascinating. I am enjoying rebuilding this inner life, under onslaught not just from my beautiful children (ha! they are so worth it) but from the giant tech beast that is coming for all of our remaining free attention and creativity (my phone stalking me from my pocket, creeping its tendrils through my hand and up my forearm, every fucking minute); the everyday capitalist closing down of free time that seems almost a mundane background struggle at this point; a government that is ever intent on policing dissenting speech and (free and flourishing) life.
Poetry, for me, is a long-held practice in/of the material present: these words, their texture, their sound – that is to say, language and bodies – all of it not closing down to a single or preferred meaning, but instead staying fundamentally alive, changing. It is the way I practice being present to mystery, to the suffering in the world, and also – if the poem is actually good – to levity or comedy, play.
It is a way to metabolize or transmute all of this.
The news, that is.
All of which is to say – I have a huge backlog of poems from this month, and you might be getting more in your inbox soon! Or maybe not. But in case you do:
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.1
My greatest apologies for your freely chosen subscription to this newsletter,
Adam
HALF TRUE [A TURNING POINT IN EVERY SCHOOL 2] In continuation of this poem – October 3rd, 2025 No. They want Id, the(ir) flowing life-energy to be un- dammed, and thus should join and form a million punk bands, someone said, instead of shooting and/or letting themselves harden into ideology, the opposite of a million. As if the idea of id could motivate and win without existing but to control oneself and others. I get hope when I see young men make music and feel things, for to be a million of ourselves could make all the difference.
Williams again – the lines from Asphodel that directly follow.