Before the poem, just wanted to say THANK YOU for reading. Good news: I have THREE poems coming in online publications this month š To celebrate, Iām going to sending out every poem Iāve 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. Thatās it love you bye.
āHeraclitus Goes to a Raveā 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:
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 āpost-festival depressionā 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 (āDown but upā / āUp but downā), and the shape of the poem (the X) is made up of two opposite V-shapes (both sharing the same point of ābutā) 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 āupā and fight the ādown,ā but thereās value in seeing, as I think Heraclitus did, what stays the same: being human. We find ways to make it all āworth it.ā
Nice. And nice gloss on the poem as well. The obvious also should be said: the commonly used drug in these venues, a drug that promotes the up-and-down feelings described (sometimes at the very same time, in fact), is called "X"--as in ecstasy.
You have the perfect voice for reading poetry!