[ALIGN=left] [/ALIGN][ALIGN=left]The recognition here is that what he is planting is endangered, imperiled, vulnerable. What he plants he will not be able to protect. The sow-ing of grain on the headland is his last gesture, his way of putting a message in a bottle when he knows he won't last much longer. The poem concludes with a terrible recognition.[/ALIGN][ALIGN=left]Jin Orten belonged to a [URL=http://www.discountmbt.com/]MBT[/URL] generation of poets who took Czech verse in a more inward direction. He did not shrink from his own subjectivity, from what he knew. "A Small Elegy" inscribes a sacred feeling, a tenderness so deep it feels almost otherworldly, a tenderness that seems always endangered, always threatened by a relendess worldliness, by temporality, by the march of [URL=http://www.discountmbt.com/]MBT Shoes[/URL]  history. It also inscribes the premonition of a death that was indeed coming for him. Orten died in a bizarre accident in Prague in the summer of 1941. One moment he was stepping off the curb to buy cigarettes from a local kiosk, the next [URL=http://www.mbt-lami.com/]MBT[/URL] he was hit and being dragged along the street by a speeding German car. He was refused admission to a nearby hospital because he was Jewish. Another admitted him, but it was too late. He died a few days later. He was only twenty-two years old. "A Small Elegy" seems to me a deeply unflinching poem. It Ls nearly unbearable. When I read it in the middle of the night, my impulse is to wake up everyone around me, everyone I love, before it is too [URL=http://www.mbt-lami.com/]MBT Shoes[/URL] late.[/ALIGN][ALIGN=left]Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that poetry is "what will and must be spoken." It is a secret that can no longer be kept secret, a way of knowing. Perhaps poetry exists because it carries necessary human [URL=http://www.mbt-lami.com/vibram-five-fingers-c-13.html?zenid=ea9711d15b496cd92fa8cb21e4b3c1e9]vibram fivefingers[/URL] information that cannot be communicated in any odier way. Some of that information is joyous, some a distress signal from afar that whispers in the inner ear. But, as Paul Valéry said about Pascal, "A distress that writes well is not so complete that it hasn't salvaged from the shipwreck." The poet is a maker who salvages from the [URL=http://www.mbt-lami.com/vibram-five-fingers-c-13.html?zenid=ea9711d15b496cd92fa8cb21e4b3c1e9]vibram five fingers[/URL] shipwreck in a particular way. Writing poetry is a way of getting something right in language, of metaphoric or transformative thinking. Articulation gratifies, and the act of making is itself a great consolation. "The passions may be terrible," Denis Don-oghue writes in Ferocious Alphabets, "but the syllables are a relief"[/ALIGN]