You don’t need more jeans. What you need is more poetry.
Annoying Levi’s ad on TV these days. Seen it? Never mind if you haven’t; you’re not missing much. Why am I writing a post about it? Because I find it interesting how retailers are using poetry to sell clothes.
The commercial in question is from Levi’s new campaign – Go Forth. The poem in question is Charles Bukowski’s The Laughing Heart, one of his more optimistic pieces, written in a gentler hand than the standard misanthropic deliveries he is known (and I will say loved) for.
Let’s face it, Charles Bukowski was a dirty old man, but he was everyone’s favorite bastard. Swilling whiskey with one hand, and feeling up a topless starlet with the other, was his idea of a portrait. And Levi’s has chosen his words as the new anthem for today’s denim wearing generation. Frankly, I don’t blame them. It was a great fucking idea.
The poem, is astounding. It simply is a work of staggering beauty and tenderness.
But Levi’s is little more than an industrial workwear brand turned urban fashion weathervane. ”Here’s what jeans need to be doing now,” Levi’s seems to say, “This is what you need to own to be cool now; a pair of jeans that tells the world you buy into Bukowski’s beautiful philosophy of hope for the youth, and their future.”
And if you already own 150 pairs, here is a beautifully shot commercial featuring the gut-twisting words of an American poetic iconoclast, to convince you to walk into their stores and buy another.
Don’t fall for it. Listen to me: You don’t need more jeans. What you need is more poetry.
- The Laughing Heart -
by Charles Bukowski
your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
Why I love… Naomi Shihab Nye
Hidden
If you place a fern
under a stone
the next day it will be
nearly invisible
as if the stone has
swallowed it.
If you tuck the name of a loved one
under your tongue too long
without speaking it
it becomes blood
sigh
the little sucked-in breath of air
hiding everywhere
beneath your words.
No one sees
the fuel that feeds you.
San Antonio
Tonight I lingered over your name,
the delicate assembly of vowels
a voice inside my head.
You were sleeping when I arrived.
I stood by your bed
and watched the sheets rise gently.
I knew what slant of light
would make you turn over.
It was then I felt
the highways slide out of my hands.
I remembered the old men
in the west side cafe,
dealing dominoes like magical charms.
It was then I knew,
like a woman looking backward,
I could not leave you,
or find anyone I loved more.
Two Countries
Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw
it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,
slept by itself, knew how to raise a
see-you-later hand. But skin felt
it was never seen, never known as
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque
and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.
Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers–silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.
Making A Fist
For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.
“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”
Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.
The Rider
A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,
the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.
What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.
A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.
*Image: by Firooz Zahedi – Elizabeth Taylor in Iran 2976
Why I love… Charles Bukowski
There is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day
and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace
those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love
beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average
but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect
like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock
their finest art
Something-like-a-poem About Something-like-love
When it was over, I just put them away.
The letters, the words – your twenty-six mix and match – in a box I called, ‘Favourites’.
When you remember you are lost,
Won’t you come look me up?
I’ll put you up; I’ll hook you up with who you were
(the who I adored).
The you I saved and kept for a day just like today.
You will find yourself there
still.
In ‘Favourites’.
* Art: Mistaken Identity by Ken Wong
Relax by Ellen Bass
Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter’s age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she’s a lesbian
and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat—
the one you never really liked—will contract a disease
that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
every four hours, for a month.
Your parents will die.
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you’ll lose your keys,
your hair and your memory. If your daughter
doesn’t plug her heart
into every live socket she passes,
you’ll come home to find your son has emptied
your refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
and called the used appliance store for a pick up—drug money.
There’s a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs halfway down. But there’s also a tiger below.
And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here’s the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you’ll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You’ll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.
I live in poetry when I live in love with you
And try as I might (and will), I will not find home nor the peace that comes with it until I have you ensconced in my arms again. I wait and yet, try not to live as though in wait. I live; perhaps I only exist and I continue only because there is the promise of tomorrow and with it, of you.
I believe you are mine and belong wholly to me. I believe it is only a matter of time before faith ripens into fact.
I believe, my love, because I know no other way.
‘… my dear love
I will not sleep without eyes,
I will not exist but in your gaze.’
*all excerpts taken from the poems of Pablo Neruda
