Viva la verses

April is National Poetry Month. I'm going to to post poems throughout the month as my way of celebrating. I hope you enjoy the poems and find a way to bring a little more poetry into your life - this month and onward. Today, I focus on Rainer Maria Rilke. I fell in love with Rilke's poetry while still in high school. I bought The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke when it came out in 1989 and still have the same well worn copy today. Although, I almost gave it away to Peter Murphy at a concert. I threw it up on stage, convinced he had to read the Dunio Elegies. By the end of the show, he collapsed and was removed by the stage hands. As the crowds cleared, I called one of them over and asked he return my book. I knew its fate was the trash if Murphy didn't take it. I'm glad I kept it. It's sat on my nightstand over the years, ready for me to leaf through in the midst of countless sleepless nights. My first year of college, I had a handwritten copy of this poem taped to the wall next to my bed. I still find it wonderful. {I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voice} I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voice surging forth with all my earthly feeling? They yearn so high that they have sprouted wings and whitely fly in circels around your face. My soul, dressed in silence, rises up and stands alone before you: can't you see? Don't you know that my prayer is growing ripe upon your vision, as upon a tree?
If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream. But when you want to wake, I am your wish, and I grow strong with all magnificence and turn myself into a star's vast silence above the strange and distant city, Time.

This piece below may not be a poem but it may make you want to attempt to write one. Or revisit some of the ones you may have written in the past. I know I have some that make me cring looking back on them now.
For the Sake of a Single Poem (Rainer Maria Rilke) "... Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)--they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else--); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along overhead and went flying with all the stars,--and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-- only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them."

Rilke is well known for Letters to a Young Poet. You can read them here. His advice to this young man will often feel it is directed toward you personally, whatever your artistic pursuit may be. All the translations here or that I link to are by Stephen Mitchell. I urge you to seek out his translations if you look for your own volumes of Rilke. They are the best. For more on National Poetry Month, visit the Poetry Foundation for daily podcasts and more.