What is the difference between a necessary poem and a poem? Are some poems unnecessary then? Who is supposed to write a necessary poem? Has any of my poets already done it before me? Or can they do it now for my sake so that I can turn into a reader at last? Is the reader of a necessary poem an entity prior to the event of her coming into contact with this poem? Or will she be born now when she sees this poem? Will she continue to be born incessantly as this poem grows big inside her, attracting other essential poems? To cut my questions short I simply ask my Swedish poet friend Ylva Eggehorn as to how she knows for sure that Brodsky has not given up on her, when her despair is beyond bearing? What is it that will make Staffan Söderblom say in one of his poems that he prefers a poem to a woman–that at night the poems come to his sheet and whisper his personal number? Will someone please explain what’s going on between Staffan and his poems, or between Brodsky’s poems and Ylva Eggehorn?

You have these questions, yes, and in asking them you have unwittingly passed through some necessary poems by these Swedish poets. As writers of such poems, they will invariably bring other poets and other poems to mind. A necessary poem takes you into an ocean of reading experience. And as writing experience, a poem like that could make you declare, along with the French writer Marguerite Duras: “Even in my death, I will continue to write.”

Among other poets of our times, it is the Brazilian poet Manuel Bandiera who perhaps continues to write in this unconventional way since his death in 1968. I will first read out the poem that has been smouldering inside me for years, and leaps into flames at the slightest provocation, simply because Manuel Bandiera never stopped writing it.

My Last Poem

I would like my last poem thus
That it be gentle saying the simplest and least intended things
That it be ardent like a tearless sob
That it have the beauty of almost scentless flowers
The purity of the flame in which the most limpid diamonds are consumed
The passion of suicides who kill themselves without explanation

Everything this poem proposes is fraught with risk. The poem fulfils, or seems to fulfil, every condition that the last poem is supposed to fulfil. In its impact it is as poignant as Gandhi’s last utterance “Hey Ram” when the assassin’s bullet hit him. Or Knut Hamsun’s last sentence to his wife: “Marie, I die now.” And yet in its ambiguity and utter transparency, it equals the very last sentence that Kafka wrote and which Helen Cixous has turned into infinity in her own way by writing about it. The incomplete sentence by Kafka is: “Lemonade everything is infinite…” The last poem fulfils the first condition of reading experience: it throws you into the heart of reading experience. No more grabbing books from your shelf. Let them stand where they will. This fire will burn until the very end, no matter how undefined this end is. And I will never know my last poem, since it will say the simplest and least intended things. It is unable to announce itself as the last poem, since it is incapable of intention. It is “Lemonade everything is infinite…” And you can never make it more or less than that. If you haven’t lived badly by loading your poems with intention, you cannot die badly either writing your last one. And like Bandiera, you will not come to know that you have written it. You are not the poet of the last poem, or the necessary poem. Like the musk-deer you will run crazy in the wilderness chasing the fragrance hidden deep inside you. It has the ardour of a tearless sob. It cannot roll down your cheek. And like the doctor in a García Marquez story, who applies the stethoscope to a man stricken with everlasting grief of his dead wife, you too can hear the tears bubbling inside his heart, the heart of this poem. The negatives in the poem very gently, very simply, with no intention on their part, bring the tears, the scent, the limpid diamonds, and the speech in the silence of the suicides, into a darkness that glows with meaning. What more can a practising poet ask of a poem?

And, what is the beauty of an almost scentless flower? Are we face to face with an absence of flower made famous by Mallarmé’s theory and practice of poetry? Is it like Bo Carpelan’s fragrance of snow, that only a written meditation on it will give some idea of its almost non-existent character? Has nature done a written meditation in the form of this flower?

It evokes all your powers to summon an absence and to feel all the contraries that you can supply with your own body. Scentless is a word that the poet has also filled with its opposite since he is also saying the simplest “and least intended thing”. The beauty here is strikingly visual and utterly fragile, since the flower is without the attribute (scent) that we humans expect of it––a poem you can’t quite grasp, utterly elusive, useless from the worldly point of view. It has broken the communicative contract with the reader and brings to mind yet another flower, or an absence of it, when you see what Marina Tsvetayeva did to the thought of love: What did you think about love, she asks, is it just a chat across the table? But before you can turn her question about love into a chat across the table, she has already defined it for you. “It is a flower flooded with blood.”

This flower is also the flame which will lick only into the most limpid diamonds in existence. The flame will die, however, when there are no more limpid diamonds to consume. It is a flame, pure and leaping, only in relation to them. The flame cannot burn itself. It is a flame, pure agni, only in relation to the other. This otherness must stand consumed in the luminous physique of language, a fire unaware of its existence as fire, with a million tongues licking up the shimmering treasure, with no signature to it. The poem isn’t my last poem anymore. What we experience as aesthetic pleasure is the dissolution of the poet’s ego in the poem––that’s what she invests into it and that’s what turns into bliss, rasa, for the reader of this poem. This is what the best of the Indian poetics would have us believe. You could try to explore the source of this pleasure in a work of art in many different ways, without being able to grasp it in the least. Maurice Blanchot and Mallarmé would attribute it to the power of words, the flame of language itself that has licked away the limpid diamonds. “Words, as everyone knows”, says Blanchot, “have the power to make things disappear. To make them appear as things that have vanished”. And who among us has not often wondered as to what happens to the human body when it comes into contact with these diamonds that stand consumed in the purity of the flame? Why is the body always rushing into the huge white spaces or the black spaces that the mystery of a work causes to shimmer between the lines? And if things have, indeed, appeared as things that have vanished, one experiences one’s body as something that rushes to stuff itself into the gaps, almost scentlessly, involuntarily, like lovers embracing in violent passion. The kiss will never take place, will never come about, as the gap in between is nature’s true gift to the living. Love, whatever on earth it might mean, never quite manages to take place, never really comes about.

In the last poem, in the poem closest to your heart, the suicide note is always missing. And since there is no clue, no easy way of reading this unwritten note, you will stand implicated until the very end, no matter how undefined that end is. Smerdyakov, in The Brothers Karamazov, is the first one who comes to mind. He is Ivan Karamazov’s double who kills himself in a way that Dmitri Karamazov will be brought to trial for his father’s murder––the writer of a note that never was, the silence that became the most powerful speech bereft of words. Smerdyakov is the illegitimate son of Fyodor Karamazov, and this father will never be asked by the Lord, his Father, to sacrifice this particular son of his. He (the son) doesn’t seem to be the Lord’s type. He will only feel compelled to sacrifice himself in order to bring the other one to trial. In accusing no one of his death, Smerdykov has turned his own death into a death that will never die, a suicide that was never committed. The living will live out until the very end an illegitimacy that once was only one man’s burden alone. Now it is everyone¹s scarlet letter–– and it will drive Ivan Karamzov to cry out deliriously in the court a sentence that has fathered a significant body of modern literature––“My Lord, who among us would not wish the death of his father?” Like a necessary poem it will bring into existence other necessary poems. It will give birth to literature, the realm of lies and shadows, a realm of utter deceit, in which truth seems to be hidden like a shimmering needle in a haystack.

(This essay was first published in Swedish translation in an issue of the Swedish poetry magazine Lyrikvännen, and was delivered as part of a longer lecture at the international Book Fair at Gothenberg in 2001.)