John Keene's "Beatitude"

Thoughts on loving love.

A note: the formatting of indented lines doesn’t show up on the final draft of this post, so here is a link to a photo of the poem.

Beatitude

Love everything.
Love the sky and sea, trees and rivers,
mountains and abysses.
Love animals, and not just because you are one.
Love your parents and your children,
even if you have none.
Love your spouse or partner,
no matter what either word means to you.
Love until you create a cavern in your loving,
until it seethes like a volcano.
Love everytime.
Love your enemies.
Love the enemies of your enemies.
Love those whose very idea of love is hate.
Love the liars and the fakes.
Love the tattletales and the cowards.
Love the hypocrites and hypercrits, the hucksters and the traitors.
Love the thieves because everyone has thought
of stealing something at least once.
Love the rich who live only to empty
your purse or wallet.
Love the poverty of your empty coin purse or wallet.
Love your piss and sweat and shit.
Love your and others’ chatter and its proof of the expansiveness
of nothingness.
Love your shadows and their silent censure.
Love your fears, yesterday’s and tomorrow’s.
Love your yesterdays and tomorrows.
Love your beginning and your end.
Love the fact that your end is another beginning.
or could be, for someone else.
Love yourself, but not too much
that you cannot love everything and everyone else.
Love everywhere.
Love in the absence of love.
Love the monsters breeding
in every corner of every city and suburb.
all throughout the soil of the countryside.
Love the monster breeding inside you and slaughter him
with love.
Love the shipwreck of your body, your mind’s
salted garden.
Love love.

from Punks, New & Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021)

---

The final two lines of another poem in John Keene’s Punks — “Ten Things I Do Every Day” — are:

leave my friends and shadows
generous margins for error

I loved these lines the moment I read them. In that poem, they have the beautiful, momentous effect of falling after a long string of detailed description, so that, when they land, they land with a compassion that is almost unexpected. Surprise compassion: what a beautiful thing.

That line — generous margins for error — feels like an apt way to approach today’s poem, which is a poem about love, yes. But it’s a poem about more than just love, isn’t it? It’s a poem about the challenge of love — the way it challenges the person who is loving and the person who is being loved, the way it is a challenge, sometimes, to love at all. It’s a poem that I think in some ways holds up the very idea of impossibility. That dreaded and often lonely word. It’s a poem that holds up that word and remarks, I think, on what might be possible.

It’s a poem, too, that begins with no qualms about where it is headed:

Love everything.
Love the sky and sea, trees and rivers,
mountains and abysses.

That first line — Love everything — is such a bold and beautiful and almost-near-impossible way to begin a poem. It’s a command. It’s universal. It’s wildly hard. And then it’s qualified. It’s qualified gently at first, with things that feel easy to love. The sky. The sea. Trees. Rivers. Mountains. But then…abysses! Such a moment forces the poem to lean headily into a challenge. And it’s not a challenge that is easily approachable. It’s a challenge that begins in the full vastness of its difficulty. It’s a poem that says love everything, and then says, yes, I mean it…love everything.

Today’s title serves as an allusion to the biblical beatitudes, which begin, in Matthew’s Gospel, with these lines:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
    for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn,
    for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
    for they will inherit the Earth.

The verses continue in the same vein, teetering on the edge of contradiction, asking their listeners to reckon with the possibility of a world that rewards those who might feel unrewarded by the world as it is. I grew up Catholic, and heard these verses countless times. It was always hard, though, for me to resonate with something like the Beatitudes when I would listen to them, especially because I didn’t know what a phrase like inherit the Earth meant. It was a phrase that hovered in the universal, that never quite landed in the real world for me. Sometimes it felt ripe with possibility. Sometimes it felt boring and inaccessible. Sometimes, though, when I was a child listening to those verses, such a phrase sounded inherently interesting, because it sounded like something somewhere might be made for me. Like I might earn a reward, just by being alive.

However, those ideas — ones based in inheritance, or earning — mean less to me now. This is one reason why I find myself turning to today’s poem. Keene’s poem never mentions any sort of even tangentially-related economic benefit to loving. In fact, he writes:

Love the poverty of your empty coin purse or wallet.

For Keene, the purpose of love seems to be love itself. The beautiful mess of it. The complex politics of compassion and generosity it invites upon its actor. Keene is not talking about love’s benefits or love’s rewards or some future world where one’s past value of love is finally given its proper due. No. Keene seems to be arguing for love — beautiful, wild love — to be valued because of what it is. And what it allows. And what it might allow.

I notice such a moment here:

Love until you create a cavern in your loving,
until it seethes like a volcano.
Love everytime.

This early in the poem, Keene asks us to love until there is an emptiness in us, a space where something that might not be love hollows us out, and makes room for something else. He asks us to love until there is a space where love, maybe, doesn’t exist. And then he follows that by asking us to continue to choose love, again and again and again.

In an essay written after the death of John Berger, Ben Lerner writes about meeting Berger. He describes a “radical hospitality,” a “receptivity.” He says:

His attention rinsed the language a little, helped us to mean.

I love that phrase — rinsed the language — and can’t help but think of it in relation to today’s poem, which does a similar sort of rinsing of the word that is love. Like a dish towel or wash rag, Keene rinses out the word love over and over again, asking us to pay continuous attention to it. What might seem simple — the word love repeated over and over again — becomes a kind of challenge of attention. In this way, the poem wonders us toward re-imagination, gently prodding us to consider in what ways we have bordered love with our own move toward cynicism or certainty. It asks us to think about how we might have made love impossible in our own lives.

And that’s a real thought, right? It is for me. I often think about how every word we often find ourselves lauding — whether patience or compassion or kindness or gentleness or tenderness or joy or anything that has to do with anything that might have to do with another human — is basically another word for love. And yet, and yet, and yet. The deeper we get into each day, the harder — sometimes — it is to feel that. To know that your patience is really a kind of love. To see the way in which your compassion comes from a wellspring of deep love. Love, love, love. It all has to do with love.

Keene pokes and prods at this notion throughout Punks. And such a playful — and it does feel playful — prodding is at play in these lines from today’s poem:

Love your enemies.
Love the enemies of your enemies.
Love those whose very idea of love is hate.

The first of these three lines is one of those impossibilities. If we have already made our enemies, how then should we love them? Or why? For what should we love them? Or for whom? But then, as if anticipating such questions, Keene makes it easier for us with the second line, which is far less challenging. Love the enemies of your enemies. Okay. Yes. I can do that. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, as the old saying goes. But then, as if anticipating that ease of love, Keene proposes another challenge. He asks us to love those who view love in an entirely different way.

I believe that Keene is being playful here because I believe that his emphasis is not on the proposed truth of his lines — if we should do exactly as he says — but rather on the way such lines make us feel. In other words: how does it feel to digest a love that is difficult, and then easy, and then difficult again? What does that make us consider about love itself, and the world that the possibility of such love exists within?

Throughout Punks, Keene wrestles with these impossible questions through the lens of blackness and queerness and desire and sexuality and sorrow and joy and life amidst the ruins of late capitalism. In “This Is a Kiki, Not an Interrogation,” Keene writes:

Because what if this guy turns out to be absolutely lovely, darling, then we’re trapped, we’ll be forced to deal with more than the drama and the bullshit. But it’s not so bad, I add as if I know what I’m talking about, even though my own current situation isn’t much different. Or maybe it is; didn’t I just meet a man, a friend, to whom I could someday share my heart?

In this poem, Keene’s speaker wrestles with possibility — the possibility of pain and assured trauma and drama mingled with a possibility of love. Such possibilities don’t exist separately; they instead come from the same person, from the same singular actuality. Humans — shipwrecked as we are — are capable of a multitude of possibilities, some nefarious, some gorgeous. Often those divergent possibilities exist within the same person. Not just often, I’d say. Always.

This is why I love these lines toward the end of Keene’s poem today:

Love the shipwreck of your body, your mind’s
salted garden.

I think the tendency toward self-help culture in our current societal moment might ask us to reframe the phrase “shipwreck of your body.” It might ask us to call ourselves something different, to repeat a more positive mantra as we look at ourselves in the mirror. But Keene doesn’t change the language here. He only adds love to it. It’s a beautiful moment. It reminds me of the fact that language can only do so much. That sometimes, things are what they are. My body — fragile and broken and sometimes limber and sometimes stiff — is a shipwreck. That is what it is. It has washed up on many shores and is, quite literally, a salvaging of different parts. In my leg there are pieces of other people’s legs. This is my shipwreck, though. It is my body. And it floats for as long as I am alive. Why not call it something similar to what it is? Why change the name? Why not just love this body as it is?

Such questions remind me of a sentence from the epilogue of Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus:

The most sincere poets want to hold your hand because, like you, we are also afraid of what we will find — some human horror to heinous to accept alone.

And the opposite is also true: we’re terrified of finding finally that Beauty that is overwhelming simply because — in the midst of all these Hells — She actually exists.

If this is the case — and I believe it is — then a sincere understanding of the world is one that holds so much possibility within itself. The possibility of real horror. The possibility of real beauty. The possibility of everything in between. Reading today’s poem, I can’t help but think that one of the best responses to such a wide range of possibility is simply love. In this way, love becomes a kind of acknowledgment — a recognition of the world as something complex and vast, full of all that is morally wonderful and morally bankrupt and all that is joyful and all that is riddled with sorrow and all that is in between.

It’s that kind of acknowledgment that I think of when Keene writes a few lines like these:

Love the rich who live only to empty
your purse or wallet.

I don’t know if Keene actually means this in the way that love is often construed — a love of gentle action and softness. But if acknowledgment is something that requires attention, and if the act of attention is also an act of love, then Keene’s acknowledgement of such a thing — the rich who live only to empty / your purse — is a kind of love. Substitute the word attention or acknowledge in this poem every time you see the word love, and see what happens. There is so much conspiring in this world to ruin our attention away from so much else. In this way, to even pay attention to something is to love it. We often think that love means validation always. But no. Love can be correction; it can be change; it can be a finger pointed to say that is wrong. When I read today’s poem, I see how wide and vast and complex love can be. I see the everything-ness of it.

And so, I return to the final lines of the poem I mentioned at the start of this essay:

leave my friends and shadows
generous margins for error

When I read today’s poem, I think of how lovely it would be to live in a world that valued generous margins for error. Our margins currently are so thin and rigid that even a word like love is painfully defined. Keene attempts to widen that margin for us, to show us the way that a word like love can be more than its supposed simplicity. That it can be political and generous and imaginative and wide-ranging and difficult and rewarding and gorgeous. It can be one of these things and some of these things and all of these things. Too often, our world says things must be one way. What a joyless idea. I’d rather live with a desire to orient myself always towards generosity. To believe in the power of words like might or could. To hope, sometimes — yes, to even hope. To, as Keene writes:

Love love.

Loving love means loving that moment of uncertainty when you first wake up and the day is foggy haze ahead of you, filled with all its potential worry and regret and stress. Loving love means rising from the bed and watching the sun turn the morning clouds violet and orange and purple. Loving love means smiling at a joke you told yourself in your head. Loving love means kissing the eyelid of someone you love. Loving love means groaning softly. It means stretching your spine. It means cracking your index finger’s knuckle with your thumb. Loving love means searching, always, for something that might bring you joy. Loving love means knowing that, if you pay attention to anything for long enough, it will probably make you smile. Loving love means talking to birds. Dreaming up words. Inventing a language. Loving love means knowing you might never have a word for the way this — all of this — means something that is impossible to say. Loving love means living anyway. It might sound simple, but it’s not. It’s love.