Tomas Tranströmer and Big R Reality

Tomas Tranströmer is the only Swedish poet I know much about (from the Robin Fulton translations), so here’s a poem from him in reaction to a report I just got from a friend who is in a creative writing program where someone recently said, “A house can only do in a poem what a house can do in real life.”

Oh my. Such assumptions about houses and about real life . . . . Such assumptions about art and the workshop . . .

So anyway, rather than go on a tirade about what “real life” might mean, and what “houses” might mean, I thought to turn to Tranströmer, to let him do the talking:


Summer Plain


We have seen so much.
Reality has used us up so much,
but here is a summer at last:

a large airfield—the flight controller is bringing down
load after load of frozen
people from space.

The grass and the flowers—here we land.
The grass has a green manager.
I report myself.