To all my readers: I wish happiness in this festive season, a brilliant start to 2026, and meaningful productivity through the coming year.
I want to share a non-musical ear-worm that has been plaguing me for the last couple of weeks. It’s not obviously Christmassy or New Yearish, but here it is.
It’s ‘I know a man’, a poem by US poet Robert Creeley.
You can read the whole poem – there are only 12 short lines – here. (You can read about Creeley at his Wikipedia post.)
When I first read ‘I Know a Man’, I didn’t think much of it, but after I’ve heard a number of enthusiasts discussing it in the online Modern and Contemporary American Poetry course (ModPo) it seems to have taken root in my mind.
As I was trying to absorb the news of the horrors of Hanukkah at Bondi Beach earlier this month, a phrase from the poem kept insisting its way into my attention:
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us
I don’t know what 29-year-old Creeley had in mind in 1955, but the phrase embodied for me the combined effect of the destruction of democracy around the world especially in the USA, the rise of terrorism in the name of Islam, the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the failure of the Voice referendum here, and now this devastating attack on Sydney’s Jews, and its Melbourne firebombing footnote. The darkness surrounds us, and it’s pressing in.
I went back to the whole poem, to see what Creeley did with that surrounding darkness.
Rather than talk about the poem, here’s a verse response – crude, hasty but I hope it communicates:
I know a poem
As I rd from a
poem, because I am
always reading, – Bob, I
rd, which was almost the poet's
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, the dark-
ness surrounds
us, the darkness
surrounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not,
why
not pass a goddamn big Act,
legislate, I rd, for
f*ck's sake, look
out who yr doing.
I don’t know if that can even count as a little candle, but what I can just now.
Me fail? I fly! 