The Task of the Poet, In a World Full of Loud Lies

The Task of the Poet, In a World Full of Loud Lies

A Sunday Pages medley, with words by John Steinbeck, Willam Carlos Williams, Zbigniew Herbert, Robert Hass, John Milton, T.S. Eliot, Neil Strauss, Nicholson Baker, John Bailey, and Anna Akhmatova.

Dear Reader,

Remember when sitcoms had those special episodes where the family would sit on the couch, and one of them would say, “Hey, remember when that funny thing happened,” and the writers would use that as a framing device to replay older material? Today’s “Sunday Pages” is that, insofar as some of the segments are from older pieces that I wanted to resurrect, for reasons that will be clear. Today’s “Sunday Pages” is not that, insofar as neither Jason nor Justine Bateman are involved.

—GO

I. The Ancient Commission of the Writer

In his Nobel banquet speech at Stockholm City Hall in December of 1962, John Steinbeck observed, “Humanity has been passing through a gray and desolate time of confusion.”

The way out of the darkness, he suggested, was through literature—which, historically,

was not promulgated by a pale and emasculated critical priesthood singing their litanies in empty churches—nor is it a game for the cloistered elect, the tinhorn mendicants of low-calorie despair.

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species….

The ancient commission of the writer has not changed. He is charged with exposing our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams for the purpose of improvement.

Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat—for courage, compassion, and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally-flags of hope and of emulation.

That endless war feels more ominous today, two days out from the Midterms. Weakness and despair are on the march. The dark and dangerous forces, cartoonishly represented here in the United States by the odious likes of Donald Trump, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Jared Kushner, and Elon Musk, are marshaling their malevolent forces, gathering to take their stand. Will they nuke Tehran? Occupy Washington? Reduce us all to poverty and sickness and want? No outcome, however monstrous, is off the table for these villains.

To defeat them—to prevail—we must have our proper nourishment. We must celebrate those qualities we have in abundance and which they lack: artfulness, poetic sensibility, humor, honesty, bonhomie, the capacity for kindness and for compassion and for love. We must trust in each other. We must use our righteous anger as fuel, to light the path to a better and more equitable place.

And we must expose their many grievous faults and failures, which means that we must demand justice. As I wrote two and a half years ago in Rough Beast, as a nation, as a people, we cannot and will not heal until the Rough Beast and all of his thief-in-law accomplices are brought to justice. (The personification of Justice is typically depicted wearing a blindfold. The blindfold is to ensure fairness, not to perpetuate darkness. If anything, the blindfold protects her wide-open eyes from the high-wattage radiance of righteousness.)

The psychic damage, the soul trauma, that Trump and his minions have inflicted on us, and will continue to inflict for as long as he remains in office, is incalculable. His continued presence in our lives is nothing less than spiritual assault and battery. From the moment that grotesque monster came down the gilded escalator in the tacky tower that bears his name, the news has been coming too fast to process, but also, paradoxically, not fast enough to bring relief.

This torrent of news calls to mind “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” a poem by William Carlos Williams. Williams is best known for short verses—the 33-word poem about eating the plums in the refrigerator is probably his most anthologized work. “Asphodel,” by contrast, is a long, rambling poem, a bit odd and hard to parse, written when he was 72, and supposedly about him confessing his infidelities to his wife as he lay dying.

Here is the end of the poem. I read this as a celebration of the power of poetry, which can—and which shall!—provide solace from the madness of the horrors swirling around us:

My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something

that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.

You will not find it there but in
despised poems.

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

The lack, that is, of what is found in poems. Art deficit. Literature dearth. Poetry famine. The quintessential MAGA complaint. (When he dies, Dear Reader, he will die miserably; of that, I have no doubt.)

Never in my 54 years on earth has the future been more uncertain. And never before has the need for poetry, for art, for literature, for beauty, been so urgent. Steinbeck was right: literature is more, not less, needed—which is perhaps why our defective AI overlords seek to destroy it.

I recall a 1993 poem by Zbigniew Herbert (1924-98) called “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito.” Born in Lwów, Poland—now Lviv, Ukraine—Herbert had the misfortune of living under two brutal occupations: first the Nazi, and then the Soviet. That harrowing experience informs his work. I can’t pretend to know what the poem, in its entirety, means. But I have always read it as a meditation on grief, and on the need to continue to serve the greater good, even in the face of death.

These lines, in Bogdana Carpenter’s translation, I take as an instruction, if not an outright command:

go upright among those who are on their knees
among those with their backs turned and those
toppled in the dust

you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony

be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important

and let your helpless Anger be like the sea
whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten

The poet Robert Hass wrote that Herbert was “an ironist and a minimalist who writes as if it were the task of the poet, in a world full of loud lies, to say what is irreducibly true in a level voice.”

Taking on that task—the task of the poet, in this nation of strident mendacity—will be vital to our survival in the days and weeks ahead.

II. They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait

By 1652, when he was 44 years old, John Milton was totally blind. This would be a difficult handicap for anyone to bear, but for a scholar who made his living reading and writing, it was akin to some infernal Dantean torment. That he managed to write Paradise Lost, one of the greatest works of English literature, with this disability makes the achievement even more miraculous. The only analog that comes to mind is the deaf Beethoven composing his Ninth Symphony.

Milton contemplates his condition in his untitled 19th sonnet—one of my favorite poems, which subsequent editors called “On His Blindness.” Its power lies in its structure. Thirteen of the 14 lines are a jumble, with sentences that skip lines, strange word choices, and odd rhymes. Then that last line, one complete sentence, hits you like an executioner’s axe-blow.

The sonnet begins:

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

He’s wallowing in self-pity, contemplating how he will have to live the second half of his life without sight.

And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide.

“The only things I’m good at are reading and writing,” he’s thinking, “and how can I do that in my present state? All I want to do is serve the cause”—the religious talk is really about his political activities—“and now I’m sidelined.”

Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies:

Again, he’s pitying himself (and who can blame him?): “Do they really expect me to do what I’m good at when I can’t fucking see? Seriously? What the actual fuck?” It is Patience, the virtue he’s most in need of, that provides the response:

God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; His state
Is Kingly.

In other words: “Don’t flatter yourself, big guy. No one is irreplaceable. God doesn’t need you, however talented you might think you are. He’s God, ffs! The best way to serve God/the cause is to show some grace: deal with what you have to deal with and STFU about it.”

And then, the end:

Thousands at His bidding speed
And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.

The perfect iambic pentameter of the last line, the wonderful poetic construction of the complete sentence, gets me every time. This is the voice of reason, the omniscient narrator, reassuring him that not everyone is fit, or fated, to serve in every capacity—and that’s okay!

Each of us has a role to play in the fight for democracy—a system of government, incidentally, that the 17th-century tyrant-hating poet championed. No one can do everything, but we must each do our part. And the part varies. The important thing is to be ready and willing—even if, like Milton, we fear we’re not able.

(This week, of course, there is a simple civic duty that all of us Americans have been standing and waiting for for two years, and must now execute.)

III. Headpiece Filled with Straw

In 2007, Neil Strauss wrote a profile of Elon Musk for Rolling Stone. He happened to be in Musk’s presence at the precise moment when his then-girlfriend dumped him (a frequent occurrence in the billionaire’s dating life, pre-MAGA). Strauss is put in the strange, Nathan Fielderish position of having to talk the subject of his cover story off the ledge. Musk even asks the journalist if he knows anyone who might want to go out with him—he’s that desperate, that terrified of spending even one night by his lonesome. Strauss writes:

I eventually tell him that it may not be a good idea to jump right into another relationship. He may want to take some time to himself and figure out why his previous relationships haven’t worked in the long run: his marriage to writer Justine Musk, his marriage to actress Talulah Riley, and this new breakup with actress Amber Heard.

Musk shakes his head and grimaces: “If I’m not in love, if I’m not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy.”

I explain that needing someone so badly that you feel like nothing without them is textbook codependence.

Musk disagrees. Strongly. “It’s not true,” he replies petulantly. “I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.” He hesitates, shakes his head, falters, continues. “It’s not like I don’t know what that feels like: Being in a big empty house, and the footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there— and no one on the pillow next to you. Fuck. How do you make yourself happy in a situation like that?”

There’s truth to what Musk is saying. It is lonely at the top. But not for everyone. It’s lonely at the top for those who were lonely at the bottom.

“When I was a child, there’s one thing I said,” Musk continues. His demeanor is stiff, yet in the sheen of his eyes and the trembling of his lips, a high tide of emotion is visible, pushing against the retaining walls. “‘I never want to be alone.’ That’s what I would say.” His voice drops to a whisper. “I don’t want to be alone.”

Fast-forward to All Saints Day, 2026. Elon Musk has spent almost half a billion dollars on political contributions— $448 million to date, all to GOP- and Trump-aligned candidates and PACs. Is it too reductive to suggest that Musk is willing to pony up a sizable chunk of change just to forestall people running for the hills when he shows up? Remember, this is the same guy who tried to invite himself to Little St. James, only for Jeffrey Epstein to tell Ghislaine, in no uncertain terms, to blow him off.

Thinking about Trump and Musk and the ugly lickspittles who are their candidates of choice—Vivek Ramaswamy, Ken Paxton, Mike Rogers, and so on—calls to mind T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.” Published in 1925, the five-part poem begins with an epigraph from Heart of Darkness. And unlike “The Waste Land,” this one requires little commentary beyond suggesting that “Death’s other kingdom” ain’t Heaven.

This is the first of the five parts:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

So much aridity in that imagery! If it were any drier, Ben Shapiro would feel compelled to weigh in. Desert souls, parched people, devoid of water, devoid of—pun very much intended—élan vital.

If you could somehow grant human form to an unpublished O. Henry short story about how you can’t buy happiness, and if that human looked like a white South African Pol Pot, the result would be Elon Musk. His billions can buy all the political ads and sleazy GOP operatives in the world—but what he needs most of all, what he can’t seem to live without, what he cannot grok even with Grok, is not for sale at any price.

IV. A Rigor Mortis of Agony

Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist is a 2009 novel about a poet, Paul Chowder, who is in the process of the selecting poems for, and writing the introduction to, an anthology he’s been asked to put together. His life is falling apart around him, he has writer’s block, and he can’t get his shit together to do the job properly. Most of the action, such as it is, takes place in his head. But the whole book is a sort of love song to poetry. It’s a “Sunday Pages” kind of novel.

I particularly enjoyed this excerpt:

There’s no either-or division with poems. What’s made up and what’s not made up? What’s the varnished truth, what’s the unvarnished truth? We don’t care. With prose you first want to know: Is it fiction, is it nonfiction? Everything follows from that. The books go in different places in the bookstore. But we don’t do that with poems, or with song lyrics. Books of poems go straight to the poetry section. There’s no nonfictional poetry and fictional poetry. The categories don’t exist. . .

Coleridge says that Alph the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man. Did it really do that? John Fogerty says that the old man is down the road. Is he? Longfellow says he shot an arrow into the air. Did he, or is he just saying he did? Poe said there was a raven tapping at his chamber door. Was there?

We don’t care. Why don’t we care? I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for you today on that important question.

And then he gets to the heart of the matter: the relationship between poems and tears. Why do beautiful poems make me cry? It’s not sadness; not quite. There’s something about the universal beauty of the art form, the rare ability of the poet to distill so much to so little. But the poet, Baker/Chowder argues, feels all the pain. To be able to select poems for an anthology, he writes, “you have to be willing to be sad.” And that sadness might lead you to think, wrongly, that you are depressed in the way poets tend to be:

And as a result, you may be tempted to think: I’m one of them. I’m John Keats. I’m Sara Teasdale. Or Longfellow. Or Louise Bogan. Or Ted Roethke—rhymes with “set key.” Or Alfred Lord Tennyson. Or John Berryman. Berryman, who wrote funny poems and then stopped writing funny poems and launched himself off a bridge and, flump, that was it for him. Many suicides. Percy Shelley. Many suicides.

So you might think to yourself, Oh boy, I am one of these great depressive figures. But you’re not. . . Not the way a real poet is depressed. You don’t even come close.

True poet’s depression is a rigor mortis of agony. It’s a full-body inability to function. You don’t want to leave your room. Louise Bogan summed in up in two quick lines. This was back in I don’t know when—nineteen-thirty-something. It was a poem in the New Yorker called “Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell.” And the lines went: “At midnight tears / Run in your ears.” She’s lying there on her back, crying. Her eyes are overflowing, and the tears are cresting and coming around, and down, and they’re flowing into her ears. There’s something direct and physical and interesting about that. Because it’s as if the crying leads directing to the hearing. Her grief leads to something audible—a poem. That’s what it does for all these really good poets. The crying and the singing are connected.

In the last ten years, as the Trump era has unfolded, I have read more and more poetry and less and less anything else. Part of that is due to my Twitter-addled attention-span problems, for sure. But there’s more to it than that. Poetry is uniquely able to capture the bleakness of these times—and, by doing so, replenish my dried-up reservoir of hope.

“Poetry,” Baker writes, “is a controlled refinement of sobbing.”

V. What Had Once Been Her Face

Akhmat Khan bin Küchük, a descendent of Genghis, was the Khan of the Great Horde in the fifteenth century. His Khanate made its capital at Sarai, a city on the lower Volga. At the Grand Stand at the Ugra River, his men retreated rather than fight the army of Ivan III, Grand Duke of Moscow, who had audaciously withheld his tribute to the Horde. Akhmat’s defeat at Ugra ended, once and for all, the “Tatar yoke” over Russia.

According to family legend, Akhmat Khan was a distant ancestor of Inna Erazmovna Stogova, mother of the poet Anna Andreevna Gorenko—who, in her late teens, borrowed the name of the long-dead Khan as her nom de plume. Thus was born Anna Akhmatova.

The poet Joseph Brodsky wrote that the “the five open A’s of Anna Akhmatova had a hypnotic effect and put this name’s carrier firmly on top of the alphabet of Russian poetry. In a sense, it was her first successful line; memorable in its acoustic inevitability, with its Ah sponsored less by sentiment than by history. This tells you a lot about the intuition and quality of the ear of this seventeen-year-old girl who soon after publication began to sign her letters and legal papers as Anna Akhmatova. In its suggestion of identity derived from the fusion of sound and time, the choice of the pseudonym turned out to be prophetic…”

Akhmatova was not put to the sword in her tent, like her ancestral Khan. But she was renounced by the (Stalinist) powers that be in Moscow, even as she established herself as one of her country’s finest poets. Her biography at the Poetry Foundation beautifully describes her genius, her uniqueness, and her tragedy:

Although she lived a long life, it was darkened disproportionately by calamitous moments. Isaiah Berlin, who visited Akhmatova in her Leningrad apartment in November 1945 while serving in Russia as first secretary of the British embassy, aptly described her as a “tragic queen,” according to György Dalos. Berlin’s assessment has echoed through generations of readers who understand Akhmatova—her person, poetry, and, more nebulously, her poetic persona—as the iconic representation of noble beauty and catastrophic predicament.

Let’s start with the noble beauty. She was six feet tall, with broad shoulders, and she did not slouch. Her neck was long, her features angular, her face strikingly distinctive, her eyes mesmerizing, her bearing regal. I would say that she looked like a Modigliani, but it’s more accurate to say that a Modigliani looked like her. She met Amedeo Modigliani in Paris in 1910, while on her honeymoon. She was 20. The great painter was five years older (and a full foot shorter).

The poet and the artist were smitten with each other. She returned to Paris a year later, this time without her husband, and stayed for a few weeks. We don’t really know what happened between them—despite the emotional vulnerability in her poetry, she was not the type to kiss and tell—but we do know they were inseparable, and that he produced a series of sketches of her in the nude. She was, in his mind, the apotheosis of the female form.

Many years later, she would write, of the voluminous letters he subsequently sent her, all of which are lost, “I remember a few sentences from his letters. Here is one of them: ‘Vous êtes en moi comme une hantise.’”

A hantise is one who haunts; the first four words mean “you are inside me.” In English Modi might have said: You’re an obsession, you’re my obsession. Given that the women in his paintings—and there are a lot of them—all take on some aspect of Akhmatova’s form, we can see quite clearly that this was the case.

Akhmatova was just as powerful an artistic force as Modigliani, if not more so. Almost immediately, she was accepted into the ranks of the great poets and artists of her era. She was born in Odesa and died in Moscow, and also lived in Kyiv and Tashkent, but spent much of her life in what was once, and what is now, called St. Petersburg. She hung out at a bohemian café, where she gave readings of her poetry and hung out with her creative friends and chain-smoked. She was an essential part of the literary scene in pre-revolution Russia. She was married to not one, not two, but three poets.

Unlike the lachrymose Louise Bogan, Akhmatova was charming and sociable and fun, and maintained friendships that lasted a lifetime. One of her old friends, the memoirist Nadezhda Mandelshtam, wife of the poet Osip Mandelshtam, wrote, “Hordes of women and battalions of men of the most widely differing ages can testify to her great gift for friendship, to a love of mischief which never deserted her even in her declining years, to the way in which, sitting at a table with vodka and zakuski, she could be so funny that everybody fell off their chairs from laughter.”

The early days of the Bolshevik era comprised a high point for Russian art and literature. The Communist government was busy putting down counterinsurgencies and had little energy for cracking down on subversive art. This was the time of Kazimir Malevich and the Russian avant-garde.

It was, alas, short-lived. Stalin quickly consolidated power. The Leningrad café was shut down. Many of her artist friends, reading the authoritarian writing on the wall, fled the country. Anna refused to leave. This decision cost her dearly. Citing an early analysis of her poems by an early-Soviet version of a “manosphere” influencer that described Akhmatova as “part nun, part whore,” her work was formally banned in 1926, and would remain so for the next 14 years.

That year, her life took a turn from quiet contentment to screaming anguish. Unable to make ends meet from her poetry, as she had always done, she lived in poverty. Her son, Lev, was in and out of jail—for the crime of being the son of Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev, her first husband, who’d been wrongly arrested and executed by the secret police in 1921; Lev himself had done nothing wrong. Anna spent her days, many of them, outside the prison in Leningrad, waiting at the high brick wall for word of his sentencing. This was during the Great Purge—the Yezhovshchina, named for the head of the secret police who wound up being purged himself—of 1936-38.

What Akhmatova experienced then was the worst and most soul-destroying form of tyranny: petty, lazy, banal, stupid, destructive, ignorant, evil—the kind of abject horror we are well along the road towards, here is the Trump Redux, two days out from the Midterms. It changed her, it drained her, but it did not break her. Even when, against all artistic impulse, she submitted a few poems ostensibly supporting the Communist regime, in the hope that doing so would prompt Lev’s release from prison (it didn’t; Stalin could tell her heart wasn’t in it), she did not waver, did not break.

During this terrible period, the secret police was so oppressive that she could not write poetry. Not that she didn’t want to; she dared not put pen to paper, because if the Stalinist goons inspecting her flat found any lines scribbled down, it might make things worse for Lev and for her.

So here’s what Anna Akhmatova did: she composed poems in short bursts. She wrote down a few lines, memorized them, had some trusted friends memorize them, and then she threw the pages into the fire.

Let me say that again: she wrote down a few lines, memorized them, had some trusted friends memorize them, and then she threw the pages into the fire.

The result was a long, fractured poem called “Requiem.” It took years to write, and it was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987—21 years after her death. The elegy begins with a few unforgettable lines of prose that she titles “Instead of a Preface.” Here, she tells of being suddenly recognized as a poet by one of the other devastated women waiting outside the city jail during the Great Purge:

Instead of a Preface

In the terrible days of the Yezhovshchina, I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, her lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she snapped out of the stupor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
“Can you describe this?”
And I said: “I can.”
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.

That one vignette, told in just seven sentences, communicates so much about living in tyranny. What victims of oppression want is for their stories to be heard. And what the poet, the writer, the filmmaker, the artist, must do—the task of the poet, in other words; their civic and their human duty—is give voice to the voiceless.

VI. The Dreadful Burden of Choice

Steinbeck ends his 1962 banquet speech by invoking the wealthy patron of the Nobel Prizes, and contemplating the grim reality of the “Right of Boom” world said benefactor helped usher in:

Understandably, I have been reading the life of Alfred Nobel—a solitary man, the books say, a thoughtful man. He perfected the release of explosive forces, capable of creative good or of destructive evil, but lacking choice, ungoverned by conscience or judgment.

Nobel saw some of the cruel and bloody misuses of his inventions. He may even have foreseen the end result of his probing—access to ultimate violence—to final destruction. Some say that he became cynical, but I do not believe this. I think he strove to invent a control, a safety valve. I think he found it, finally, only in the human mind and the human spirit.

To me, his thinking is clearly indicated in the categories of these Awards. They are offered for increased and continuing knowledge of man and of his world—for understanding and communication, which are the functions of literature. And they are offered for demonstrations of the capacity for peace—the culmination of all the others.

Less than fifty years after his death, the door of nature was unlocked, and we were offered the dreadful burden of choice. We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God. Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world—of all living things.

The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. The test of his perfectibility is at hand. Having taken Godlike power, we must seek in ourselves for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have.

Man himself has become our greatest hazard and our only hope.

These words carry more weight now, as the Trump/Hegseth plan to escalate the “excursion” with Iran—a plan deemed “insane” by Senator Chris Murphy—is feared to involve unleashing our arsenal of atomic weapons. In the Orwellian calculus of MAGA, the only way to prevent nuclear war with Iran is to initiate nuclear war with Iran.

If Trump and his nihilistic lackeys are our greatest hazard, the rest of us, collectively, are our only hope.

VII. The Only Way to Stay Living and Sane

What to do, when the evil becomes overwhelming? When all hope feels lost? When the rage burns itself out, and the frustrations of our individual ability to resist—to fight back—decays into (low-calorie) despair?

That’s where the poetry comes in.

Me, I invoke these two lines from Herbert’s “The Envoy of Mr. Cogito.” I repeat them in my mind, and sometimes out loud, over and over, like a mantra:

you were saved not in order to live
you have little time you must give testimony

“On His Blindness” is about Milton’s frustration with not being able to give testimony (“present / My true account”). William Carlos Williams speaks of the urgency of “news.” “Requiem” is Anna Akhmatova giving testimony. In an excellent summation of her work at Book Beat, I came across this excerpt from “The Sheer Necessity of Poetry,” a review of Roberta Reeder’s 1990 edition of The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, written by the New York Times critic John Bailey:

In a happier country [poetry] is one of the amenities, not the needs. The culture that is optional and varied in a civilized society was for many in Stalin’s country the only way to stay living and sane.

For this reason the poet must never forget, or allow the new barbarism to blot out the past. Akhmatova saw her poetic role as one of remembering and bearing witness.

Remember. Bear witness. Present the true account.

You must give testimony.

This feels insignificant, I realize, if not inadequate. But at the end of the day it is the one thing that all of us can do. And I promise you, Dear Reader—I promise you!—it is enough.

Today, I give testimony.

Tuesday, the nation gives testimony.

And, as we await the verdict with great anxiety and trepidation, I will content myself with the certitude that there is no justice more satisfying than the poetic kind.

ICYMI

We had our fourth annual Halloween Special on Friday, with special guests Rosanna Arquette, Nina Burleigh (briefly, ans yes, she’s okay), Cheri Jacobus, Nadine Smith, and Donnie aka CHUNK.

Please note that Friday, November 6, will be the season finale of The Five 8. We will pop in for a holiday special in December, and roll out a new season in January.

Photo credit: Portrait of Anna Akhmatova by Olga Della-Vos-Kardovskaya, 1914.

© 2026 Greg Olear
PO Box 435, West Park, NY 12493