{"id":12071,"date":"2025-12-11T19:51:54","date_gmt":"2025-12-11T23:51:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/poet-john-keenes-spell-against-despair-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2025-12-11T19:51:54","modified_gmt":"2025-12-11T23:51:54","slug":"poet-john-keenes-spell-against-despair-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/poet-john-keenes-spell-against-despair-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Poet John Keene\u2019s Spell Against Despair \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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By Maria Popova<\/h3>\n
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\"Beatitude:<\/a><\/p>\n

How do we live whole in a breaking world? It helps to bless what is<\/a> simply for being. It helps to thank everything<\/a> for its unbidden everythingness. And still we need help \u2014 help holding on to the beauty amid the brutality, help stripping the armors of certainty to be complicated by contraction and more tenderly entire with one another, help seeing the variousness of the world more clearly in order to love it more deeply.<\/p>\n

The help of a lifetime comes from John Keene\u2019s poem \u201cBeatitude\u201d \u2014 a poem partway between mantra and manifesto, a protest in the form of prayer, a spell against indifference, broadening Amiri Baraka\u2019s instruction to \u201clove all things that make you strong\u201d<\/a> and deepening Leonard Cohen\u2019s instruction for what to do with those who harm you<\/a>, carrying the torch Whitman lit when he urged us to \u201clove the earth and sun and the animals\u201d<\/a> and every atom of one another, all the while speaking in a voice entirely original yet sonorous with the universal in us. It is read here to the accompaniment of Zo\u00eb Keating\u2019s perfect \u201cOptimist.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n