Hot Tea! has been written mostly after the birth of the first of
my children although, Who Shall Sing, When Man is Gone contains a
few poems from this period as well. They were also written as my life
has become somewhat more meditative, as I have become increasingly
interested in Zen and the fundamental basis of knowledge. Quite lot of
the philosophical influences that are coming to fruition are expressed
in some of the in-progress essays under my philosophy pages. In these,
especially in the aforementioned book Axioms I attempt to
articulate in simple prose some of the insights that are probably better
captured in poetry.
At any rate, a number of the poems in Hot Tea! are generally
Buddhist in nature, although I perceive of the Buddha as a philosopher and not as a religous figure and especially not as a
god – an avatar of Vishnu as he is held to be even by many who
should know better. According to Buddha's own words, and the words of
many other Buddhas and Bhodisattvas that both preceded and followed him
in cultures all around the world, he is neither more nor less an avatar
of God than any of us are that share in our hearts a spark of fire, a
holy spirit, an Atman. Every instant of awareness is a direct
contradiction to the idea that nothing ever could be, if the
terms themselves are sufficiently self-contradictory to demonstrate this
directly as “the” fundamental empirical observation/tautology upon
which knowledge of things can be based.
This collection also contains some of what I now view as my best
poems, ones that I really do think can stand the test of time. Not to
toot my own horn, but “An Open Letter to Humankind” and “Planting
Season” are really good poems, as are quite a few of the shorter
ones. “Hot Tea!”, for example (which has been selected for
republication on a number of websites interested in – tea – imagine
that!)
There are a few irreverent poems as well – I poke a bit of fun at W. B.
Yeats in “Driving to Byzantium”, a more-or-less perfect translation of
“Sailing to Byzantium” for modern times. I couldn't do this if I
didn't love and even revere Yeats – when my kids were babies I used to
put them to sleep by reciting a variety of Yeats and Tennyson (Ulysses)
to them from memory. Even now, if I start in with “It little profits
that an idle king...” I can make my eldest son start to nod.
Recently I've turned again to political poetry, poetry designed to make
people think about the way the world works and in particular ways that
the world might be changed to become a better place. The twentieth
century was the end of the Age of Kings; at its beginning most of the
world's population was ruled by kings, by dictators, by emperors, and in
nearly all cases these individuals and their military, cultural, and
economic support structure were “greedy” and aspired to bigger
kingdoms, bigger empires, bigger domains of subjugation. The century
was one absolutely dominated by wars, and each and every war, every
revolution, hot or cold as the case may be, ended with the defeat of the
King and a step toward personal and economic freedom.
Today only a handful of rag-tag remnants of royalty remain: England has
its silly Queen, Saudi Arabia and Jordan their Kings and Queens and
Princes. A few Sultanates persist, and there are unfortunately quite a
few countries where there are Presidents-for-Life, Dictators, unelected
Generals, and one-party Oligarchies, with all the evils of nepotism,
incompetence, unearned rank and power and wealth, surpression of
freedom, and the appalling lack of accountability that are the hallmarks
of the Feudal age. This topic is tackled in several new poems, notably
“The Age of Kings is Over”, and “I Do Not Own the Land”. There will
likely be more – I have minor fantasies that one day somebody out there
on the Internet will read my poetry and discover that a lot of it can
serve as a banner for righteous causes and perhaps make an actual
difference in the world.
The one final comment to make about this collection is that it is incomplete in that I'm still writing and adding poetry to it, and I'm
also still editing and changing the poetry that is there. I do not rule
out the possibility that a future Lulu version of this book will contain
new poems, or that the poems in it will be slightly different. This is
one of the benefits (or perhaps curses) of web-based publication and
word processors – it is so easy to correct errors, to make
improvements, to treat every document as a living thing, never quite
brought to an end in the lifetime of the writer. I work on poems for
years, fixing a misspelling, altering a line to it scans better,
sometimes rewriting whole stanzas. A poem you read today might be a
different poem in five years – perhaps better, perhaps not, but
different nevertheless. Only my Subversion tree (my current revisioning
system, after CVS before it and RCS before that) contains the full
revision history of my poetry, and even my revision history only
stretches back so far. Some of the poems were written on paper and kept
for years before making it into Wordstar on my original 64K
motherboard IBM PC, back in 1982 or thereabouts.
Feel free to let me know what you think of these poems. You can send me
email at rgb at phy duke edu (regrettably obfuscated to try to foil
spambots), or send me paper mail at:
Robert G. Brown
Duke University Physics Department
Box 90305
Durham, NC, 27708-0305