Presocratic Blues

Chax, 2009

We now call them the Presocratics. Their writings come down to us in pieces: Heraclitus claimed, “You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others go ever flowing on”; we have Zeno arguing that motion does not exist, an arrow needing to go halfway to the target before striking it, but needing to go half way of that half way first, and so on. In how they were right in the wrongest ways, and wrong in the rightest we hear our better thoughts; their fragments call to mind the blues: in their graves perhaps, these philosophers hear themselves in its songs, for their singers, too, glimpsed instances, like heartbreak, exhaustion, being broke, or drunk, or trying to hold onto a faith; in these Hellenistic remnants we hear the echoes of Blind Willie Johnson’s apologetics and Bessie Smith’s epistemology of love. Anaxagoras also sang on steps advising passersby that all objects contain elements of all other objects: the much bigger, for instance, has the small in it, but it has mostly huge. They, like us, were between religion and science—between the mysticism of the everyday and the shifting ground of understanding. They too were smitten and baffled by what could be seen and touched, and by events.

“In Presocratic Blues the presocratics walk among us, obsessed with the everyday: the rain, the bar, the blues. And the poems that result are full of correspondence, of discovery in the Spicerian sense. These are poems that remind us that behind every simple moment is a larger question about the universe and humanity’s place in it.” — Juliana Spahr

“In Presocratic Blues, Joel Bettridge takes us back home, back to that poor old actuality at the presocratic horizon of thought and matter. But we are no happier for it. We go down to the river, a Heraclitan flux that just keeps rolling, witness to despair and wicked deeds. These are sharply intelligent poems, full of acerbic wit, absurdity, and heartbreak.” — Devin Johnston

“We breathe in Greek and exhale the pure products of Americana; a vernacular philosophy. Joel Bettridge not only knows this but has strummed it in poems witty, raucous, and bluesy.”  — Charles Bernstein