‘The Perfect Poem’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
If you follow poetry, odds are you’ve seen this poem by Kaveh Akbar, perhaps you’ve even read it, but you should see it again, even read it again. Breathe it in. Let it remake your whole self for a moment. And if you’re not a poet, this doesn’t have to be a poem about poetry. Poetry, after all, could be said to be forever incomplete—a testament to the impossibility of replicating on the page the alchemic process of experience and emotion. The “perfect poem” is a vessel for whatever you need it to be: it’s something ephemeral and colossal. “It is not a state of mind or a kind of doubt / or a good or bad habit or a flower of any / color.”
Sit with this poem. Then read Tracy K. Smith’s essay on duende and note:
[O]ur poems are not things we create in order that a reader might be pleased or impressed (or, if you will, delighted or instructed); we write poems in order to engage in the perilous yet necessary struggle to inhabit ourselves—our real selves, the ones we barely recognize—more completely.