Health Care Reform At It's Most Inspiring: Miroslav Holub

While the US government tries to figure out how to make reforms during our health care crisis, I've been thinking more and more about a poet who shaped the way I think about poetry. Czech Poet Miroslav Holub was a truly talented human being. In fact, "poet" is not the first title for which he should be recognized. He was an immunologist with a brilliant scientific mind. His writing on medicine and human biology lent itself well to speaking about life generally. What appealed greatly to me, when I first found him in 1996 (two years before he died) was his amazing chronicle of life and the way his writing was built on being alive during some of the most challenging periods in history (he was born in 1923). Below is a poem entitled "Although" (Ackoli), from his collection of writing of the same name published in 1969.

I share this particular work because for over a decade I've been writing various versions of my response to this poem. It changes daily in the way I think about some of the issues he brings up here and to me that makes it a timeless piece of genius.

FYI: Because of formatting in Blogspot, some of the lines run over, so follow the punctuation, or just read it however you feel like it!


Although

Although a poem arises when there's nothing else to be done, although a poem is a last attempt at order when one can't stand the disorder any longer,
although poets are most needed when freedom, vitamin C, communications, laws, and hypertension therapy are also most needed,
although to be an artist is to fail and art is fidelity to failure, as Samuel Beckett says,
a poem is not one of the last but of the first things of man.

Certainly a poem is only a game.
Certainly a poem exists only at the moment of origin and at the moment of reading. And at best in the shadow-play of memory.
Certainly one can't enter the same poem twice.
Certainly a poet has the impression from the beginning that no purpose exists, as Henry Miller has said.
Certainly art becomes generally acceptable only when it declines into a mechanism and its order becomes a habit.
But in its aimlessness, in its desperate commitment to the word, in its primal order of birth and re-birth, a poem remains the most general guarantee that we can still do something, that we can still do something against emptiness, that we haven't given in but are giving ourselves to something.
The most general guarantee that we are not composed only of facts, of facts which, as Ernst Fischer says, are deeds withered into things.
Provided a poem, which is the poet's modest attempt to put off disintegration for a while, is not regarded as the philosopher's stone, bringing salvation and deliverance to stupefied mankind.
For art doesn't solve problems but only wears them out.
For art is fidelity to failure.
For a poem is when nothing else remains.
Although ...