“You can’t afford to kill time, while time is killing you!”
This week’s poem is “Factory”, by the great Milwaukee poet, Antler. There are so many memorable lines in this poem that I couldn’t begin to cite my favorites. So I’ll just leave it at the one above.
Allen Ginsberg called Antler, “...one of Whitman’s poets and orators to come…”, and he convinced Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights Books to publish “Factory” in 1980 as part of the Pocket Poets Series. It’s number 38 in the series, for those of you who are keeping track. Ginsberg’s famous poem, “Howl”, is number 4, by the way.
I’m proud to say that I have a signed copy of the book. Antler lives nearby in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee. He’s a bit of a recluse, but aren’t all poets to some degree? When I delivered his copy of the 2018 Wisconsin Poets Calendar, which I co-edited, I took my copy of “Factory” with me and asked for the autograph. He invited me in and we chatted for about half an hour. In Ginsberg’s back cover blurb for the book he states, “...this is more fineness than I thought probable to see again in my lifetime…”. That’s high praise indeed.
There are still a few copies floating around on Amazon, but it’s a rare book now and they are pretty dear. If you can afford it though, buy a copy and sink yourself into all 1600 lines of inspiration.
Meanwhile, here is the opening of the poem. I just read it again and I still get the chills.
Until next week.
Ed
Factory --by Antler
(beginning of section 1)
The machines waited for me.
Waited for me to be born and grow young,
For the totempoles of my personality to be carved,
and the slow pyramid of days
To rise around me, to be robbed and forgotten,
They waited where I would come to be,
a point on earth,
The green machines of the factory,
the noise of the miraculous machines of the factory,
Waited for me to laugh so many times,
to fall asleep and rise awake so many times,
to see as a child all the people I did not want to be,
And for suicide to long for me as the years ran into the mirror
disguising itself as I grew old
in eyes that grew old
As multitudes worked on machines I would work on,
worked, ceased to exist, and died,
For me they waited, patiently, the machines,
all the time in the world,
As requiems waited for my ears
they waited,
As naked magazines waited for my eyes
they waited,
As I waited for soft machines like mine
time zones away from me, unknown to me,
face, flesh, all the ways of saying goodbye,
While all my possibilities, like hand over hand on a bat
to see who bats first, end up choking the air—
While all my lives leap into lifeboats
shrieking—"You can't afford to kill time
while time is killing you!"