Poem of the Week: 10.6.22

"Heraclitus Goes to a Rave" by Ricky Novaes de Oliveira

Before the poem, just wanted to say THANK YOU for reading. Good news: I have THREE poems coming in online publications this month 😭 To celebrate, I’m going to sending out every poem I’ve had published so far (9 all together!!) in this newsletter. It feels a bit flashy to me, but many of you have told me you want to see more of my writing, and now it will be in one place. That’s it love you bye.

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“Heraclitus Goes to a Rave” by Ricky Novaes de Oliveira

This poem was my first one published in the University of Chicago Arts Magazine, Winter 2019 edition (page 18), print and online.

Read by poet:

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I wrote this poem in my first Creative Writing class the night before it was due. The topic was concrete poetry (poems that have a form or shape related to their meaning) and I was struggling to write. Inspiration finally came from a good friend that had just spent the weekend partying in the desert. He told me about his euphoric, drug-fueled experience he had undergone, but also about what he feared would happen in the coming days. Many rave-goers suffer from “post-festival depression” spurred by dehydration, drug comedown, and return to reality, and my friend told me he anticipated having a few days (or even weeks) of being unhappy. A day and a half of living it up, followed by days and weeks of life getting you down; for my friend, it was all worth it.

This poem sits at the crossroads of that conversation and my own experience with depression. In my experience, depression can be oxymoronic: good days can be clouded by bad feelings, and you can be outwardly succeeding in life feel weighed down inside. As does this poem: the language contradicts itself (“Down but up” / “Up but down”), and the shape of the poem (the X) is made up of two opposite V-shapes (both sharing the same point of “but”) against each other. Heraclitus was an ancient Greek philosopher who theorized about how things are both the same and not the same over time, so he stands as the specter in a poem that considers that same idea. We do so much in life to stay “up” and fight the “down,” but there’s value in seeing, as I think Heraclitus did, what stays the same: being human. We find ways to make it all “worth it.”