Live Encounters Poetry & Writing April 2025
The Arcades Project 2, poems by Richard W Halperin.
The Arcades Project 2
I am reading a poet’s poems – Jessie
Lendennie’s – for the hundredth time
and wondering how she does it:
‘Pretty,’ ‘Walking Here,’ ‘And the child said,
“If you love me, take me with you”’ –
and they are as good as the stars, but closer.
They are part of what goes through my mind
all the time now. So much else does, too:
people from my childhood, remarks from
my childhood, from all the offices I ever
worked in, from conversations with
my wife, with friends, with waiters,
with pharmacists. ‘Remarks are not
literature, Hemingway,’ Gertrude Stein
said when he showed her The Sun Also
Rises and she saw her ‘You are all
a lost generation’ on an opening page
of epigraphs, and she was quite right,
by me: as friends show me their
manuscripts or their sketches or talk
to me about their dreams and their
arguments, or will never talk to me
about their dreams and their arguments,
while through my own mind – and heart –
swirl fragments of Jung, of George Eliot,
of interviews with celebrities of my youth –
Marilyn Monroe just before the end saying
‘An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument.
Isaac Stern takes good care of his violin.
What if everybody jumped on his violin?’ –
my grandfather Halperin’s laughing
in my face when I, at age 13, said to him
that Wagner was a much greater composer
than Rossini – all swirl by, remarks,
remarks, remarks, like the Woman
at the Well’s ‘he told me everything
about myself that I ever did do’ – and
I am in the sociologist Walter Benjamin’s
The Arcades Project, his great unfinished
posthumous fragment, I am in the huge
nineteenth-century glass-and-wrought-iron
Arcade my wife and I used to walk
thank God. Remarks are remarks.
They are what, after my hair turned
white, I live in: in remarks, in an Arcade
of remarks, an Arcade like Walter
Benjamin’s, shopping and selling,
people shopping and selling swirling
through when we lived on the rue
du Bouloi a few streets away – everyone
shopping and selling looking for something
which is an up by which to help get
through life or to distract from life,
since God was sanitised out of life
during The Enlightenment (to imitate
the way Alice B. Toklas talked:
‘the term “Enlightenment” is a scream’) –
and now, every remark I ever heard
comes back to me, swirling above
the ground I walk on which is not,
no, never, the ground of the Arcade,
but rather the solid ground of good literature –
The Sun Also Rises is literature, Miss Stein
recognised that immediately – the solid ground
of Jessie’s poems, the solid ground of the
Tuba Miram of Mozart’s (posthumous,
Mr Benjamin) Requiem which my wife
loved, and now she can hear it direct,
and now I can almost hear it.
***
Should I buy a book
by Walter Benjamin? –
those little immense elements
which might destabilise me,
as Auden and Arendt have.
In a bookshop, I reached
for The Arcades Project –
like most of his, tragically
posthumous. I returned it
to the shelf immediately.
The damage was done
by the cover photo:
the huge wrought-iron-and-glass
shopping arcade which
my wife and I had sometimes
walked through when we
lived on the rue du Bouloi
a few streets away.
A title – not his –
ran through my head:
Where Were You When You
Woke Up?
No idea. For a moment
there was no I, no my wife,
no Walter Benjamin,
no place, no time and maybe
no question.
Was It Dusty on the Train?
I think of Billie Holiday, her way
with a song. Tonight she makes me write letters.
A letter to Dennis Greig who improved
the way I present a poem.
A letter to my grammar school teacher
Mrs Levin who, like Dennis, encouraged me
and so many others to write well.
They both had their private griefs, and stowed it.
Letters to everyone dear to me
who are no longer here. When any life ends,
all of it becomes a letter.
Tonight I write to all of them using
someone else’s words, and so what? Words
are not the Shroud of Turin. Or are they?
Yesterday we had some rain
but all in all, I can’t complain.
Was it dusty on the train?
P.S. I love you.*
*P.s. I Love You Lyrics by Johnny Mercer.
© Richard W Halperin
Richard W. Halperin’s poetry is published by Salmon/Cliffs of Moher and by Lapwing/Belfast & Ballyhalbert. In April 2025, Salmon will bring out All the Tattered Stars: New and Selected Poems, Introduction by Joseph Woods – the Selected drawn from Mr Halperin’s four Salmon collections and from sixteen Lapwings.