A Sustaining Note: How John Keene's 'Beatitude' Offers a Counterpoint to Modern Despair

19 hours ago7 min read1 comments

In an era defined by relentless news cycles and digital cacophony, we seek grounding—a rhythm to counter the disorienting spin. For many, that anchor is music: a lyric that names the unnamed feeling, a chord that halts time.This same profound resonance emanates from poet John Keene’s collection, particularly from his work 'Beatitude. ' Engaging with it transcends reading; it is an experience akin to hearing a deep, sustaining note—a deliberate spell cast against contemporary anguish.The poem occupies a sacred space between mantra and manifesto, its protest voiced not through shouts but through sheer, stubborn presence. Keene provides no simple answers for living wholly in a fractured world.Instead, he offers a methodology of attention, a practice of listening until static transforms into song. He instructs us in blessing the 'unbidden everythingness' of existence—the cracked pavement, the weary sigh, the fleeting kindness.This is not passive acceptance but an active, radical form of seeing that dismantles the armor of certainty. We construct shells of being right, of having life figured out, yet Keene’s verse complicates us.It invites contraction and nuance, rendering us more tenderly entire with one another and with the world’s beautiful mess. It achieves the clarity of a perfectly mixed track, where every instrument becomes distinct: the bassline of history, the high hat of immediate anxiety, the persistent melody of hope.To love the world more deeply, as the poem urges, one must first see it in its multifaceted reality—beyond the curated highlight reel or the doomscroll. 'Beatitude' serves as that clarifying lens.It calls to mind the great protest songs not of outright anger, but of devastating subtlety—Marvin Gaye’s 'What’s Going On' or Nina Simone’s 'Stars. ' These works do not merely catalog pain; they hold it, alchemizing it with beauty to forge resilience.Keene’s poetry is a literary kin to this tradition. It provides a lifetime’s support not by dispensing solutions, but by transforming the reader.Like a favorite album, 'Beatitude' rewards return visits, each pass revealing a new inflection, a previously missed harmony. In an age of hot takes and reactive discourse, the poem demands and rewards slow, repeated engagement.It is a masterclass in emotional and intellectual cadence, proving that the most potent resistance can be a sustained, beautiful, complicated note of care—a deliberate act of witnessing that insists on the worth of all things, even those that wound. The ultimate lesson, whether found in a blues bar, a symphony hall, or on the quiet page, remains: beauty is not merely adjacent to brutality; it is often woven directly through it. Learning to hear that complex chord changes everything.

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