The mother dies to protect her children. Mandelstam called Stalin, the crag dweller of the Kremlin, and died on his knees repudiating his poetry and betraying his friends. Like a joke in Church, the rude line spread. Something lived on, kept alive by poets like Brodsky and, better than Reagan s Star Wars, brought the Kremlin down. Some day we will have a folk saying, He died as a happy as a rich man on Prozac.
Advertising is designer genes for the soul.
Poetry said Rimbaud, mistaking it for advertising, is the systematic derangement of all the senses. Advertising, like poetry, is the daughter of memory. For every brand created an English word dies. The Eskimo is said to have 40 words for snow. Venus, Mars, Apollo - how poor the Pantheon seems.