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Published: Sun Apr 15 1990
Eva Lundsager, Were now like (detail), 2021, oil on canvas
Now in Your Hand
  1. Victor Hugo: Preface to Les Misérables, 1862

SO LONG AS, on this earth, in our civilization, fixed there by its laws
and its customs, HELL EXISTS—A DAMNATION MADE BY MEN
over and above the fate all men must face;

SO LONG AS the three great violations of our age,

_                    men debased by the nature of their work
women devoured by their hunger
children stunted by night without light_

are unsolved, and even unseen;

SO LONG AS the world human beings have made is a world where we
cannot breathe;

IN SUM, SO LONG AS ALL THAT IS AT HOME ON THIS EARTH
ARE IGNORANCE AND MISERY WITHOUT RECOURSE OR
VOICE,

books such as the one now in your hand will not, I think, be, perhaps,
useless.

 

_                                                                          _when

once, pursuing the enslaving enemies and enslaving protectors
of our civilization, but encountering
only the unthinkable, a blank screen, banal
interiority, commas multiplying ad infinitum, in
short, the appearance in his consciousness of the consciousness
of the appearance of himself

_                                             _when he doubted he ever believed they exist

he found that they destroyed enemies and friends

using the means in which he believed,
this system in which in every sentence you can insert not

See what's inside AGNI 29 and 30

Frank Bidart was the recipient of the 2007 Bollingen Poetry Prize and his chapbook Music Like Dirt was the first chapbook to be nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. A professor of English at Wellesley College since 1972, Bidart recently published a collection of lyrics, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009). (updated 7/2010)

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