La Reversible

John Hartley Williams nació en Cheshire (Reino Unido) en 1942 y murió en Berlín (Alemania) en 2014. SOMETHING TO READ Today, a poem by a member of the American Academy of Letters – a man who entitles his poem ‘Happiness’. In the poem: some Asian philosophy – the flow – you know something about ‘the intentions of the day’. But how can a day ‘intend’? The lines of this intentional poem have all been justified rightwards – and at the end, some happy thoughts occur to our laureate about great poets: Basho, Walt Whitman, Ernest Snaffleburger, Czeslaw Milos, Rilke. Those are his heroes (except for Snaffleburger, I just put that in to see if you read this far). Now, Ernest had none of Basho’s brevity, none of Whitman’s barbaric yawp. Ernest laughed a lot but I’m not sure that he was  happy . He had several wives and he kissed them all in different beds. Ask him about it all, he’d write you a poem called ‘Tears’ and chuckle as he scribbled a lyric imposs...