Live Encounters Poetry & Writing August 2025
Two Poems for Peace by Richard W Halperin.
Further
If I were forced to name, at this moment,
the greatest poet who ever lived,
Homer and Sappho included, I would say
Wilfred Owen. Further, I would say
the twenty-three poems which Siegfried
Sassoon selected and sequenced for
the first published collection of Wilfred
Owen’s poetry. Sassoon’s Introduction
shames me by its brevity and by its
absolute rightness.
‘At this moment’ because: look at
our world. This is what (again) we
have done with peace.
Why write at all, when writing changes
nothing? And it has changed nothing:
look at our world. But sometimes writing
does change something. Wilfred Owen’s
poetry changes me. I know more than ever,
thanks to him, that I am ashamed.
Einstein writes, in his book on relativity,
that he rejects a formula put forth
by one of his great predecessors, because
it lacks charm. The universe must have
charm. I think that Einstein might say
that his own formula acknowledges charm,
and that it also acknowledges the strong
possibility of being used shamefully.
A friend just wrote me, ‘The holes in reality
may reveal spaces for mercy.’ I hope so.
Chance
Two gratuitous wars are going on
at the moment. I do not understand
any of it. I only understand that those
who start a war are responsible for
every single subsequent death and
maiming, because a war, once started,
is uncontrollable. It takes on a madness
of its own. In Thomas Mann’s Dr Faustus,
which is chaos portrayed without respite
for six hundred pages, a Mephistophelian
being to whom Dr Faustus wants to sell
his soul says to him, That you can
only see me because you are mad,
does not mean that I do not really exist.
It is not given to me to understand
Caesar and the things that are Caesar’s.
I think of 1991, Vienna. My wife and I
met by chance the composer Gottfried
von Einem and his wife the playwright
Lotte Ingrisch who owned a flat
we were about to rent. They invited us
to the Stüberl which Schubert had
frequented. Schubert’s booth there
had become ‘Gottfried’s booth.’
Gottfried showed us the scratches,
some of them musical, which Schubert
had made on the wood. Schubert who,
like all the artists I have ever met, had been
very happy and very unhappy.
This I understand. This, I am glad
to understand.
© Richard W Halperin
Richard W. Halperin is a U.S./Irish dual national living in Paris. His poetry is published by Salmon (four collections) and by Lapwing (eighteen smaller collections.). In Autumn 2025, Salmon will bring out All the Tattered Stars: New and Selected Poems, Introduction by Joseph Woods.