Fall 2021 | Laura Stephenson Reads "A Renaissance Within the Republic" – MQR Sound
Poet Laura Stephenson reads her poem "A Renaissance Within the Republic" from MQR's Fall 2021 issue.
thinking of poetry, bang your tambourine!
denounce imitative ones, say it’s vicious,
kids! discover what an imitator is
in the midst of the dark affair.
sigh with relief and end an inferior thing.
don’t mind if they, in lyric or epic poetry,
write so well about what music should do to you.
work the rational, all that’s serious.
wack away your lamentation, misfortunes that can
stammer like pleasure and pain.
betray what may be the truth! the instruments
of appearances
clap us happy; compel us to believe
love becomes its own peculiar evil.
you don’t believe me?
if a good poet brightens dirtied
parts of a person's power, we'll cling on.
our hearts, its moan, a sail for the sea of image.
the majority of people know nothing.
eyes to the gods on earth—my ass!
whenever we listen to chanting poetry,
that childish passion of excitable imitations,
like hunks of driftwood slipping back
out of the sea,
other vices now dwell in the same way.
at least the opinion of those who busy
with the hand organ
isn't enough to kill
the bonds from heaven stretching them up!
separate trumpet from body.
certainly, let's show we were wrong.
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Plato. “X, Republic.” In Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper, 1199–1223.
Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997.
O’Hara, Frank. “Renaissance.” In The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, edited by
Donald Allen, 55. New York: Knopf, 1971.
For more from the Why We Write issue of MQR, you can purchase the issue here.
