Beatitude: Poet John Keene’s Spell Against Despair

7 hours ago7 min read1 comments

In a world that often feels like it’s spinning off its axis, where the daily headlines can be a brutal symphony of conflict and loss, we all search for an anchor. For a melody to cut through the noise.For me, that’s always been music—the raw confession of a blues guitar, the defiant hope in a folk chorus, the complex harmony of a jazz ensemble that finds beauty in dissonance. But recently, I found that same profound resonance not in a song, but in a poem: John Keene’s “Beatitude.” Reading it felt less like parsing literature and more like hearing a long-lost track from a classic album, one that speaks directly to the soul’s current ache. Keene, a writer whose work has always moved with the rhythmic precision and thematic depth of a master composer, offers here a piece that exists in that vital space between a mantra and a manifesto.It’s a protest, yes, but not one shouted through a megaphone; it’s a protest sung in a low, steady voice against the despair that threatens to become our default setting. The central question it poses is the one humming in the background of our lives: “How do we live whole in a breaking world?” Keene’s answer isn’t a simplistic prescription or a call to blind optimism.Instead, it’s an invocation, a practice. It helps, he suggests, to bless what simply is for being.To offer thanks for the “unbidden everythingness” of existence—the stubborn weed cracking the pavement, the shared glance with a stranger, the quiet persistence of ordinary life amidst extraordinary chaos. This isn’t passive acceptance; it’s an active, disciplined recognition of value, a way of tuning our perception to a frequency beyond the catastrophic.Think of it as the lyrical equivalent of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On”—a work that stares directly into social and spiritual turmoil but responds with a profound, grieving love rather than nihilistic rage. The poem functions as a spell, a series of linguistic chords meant to fortify us.It helps us hold onto beauty not as a distraction from brutality, but as its necessary counterweight. It asks us to strip off the “armors of certainty,” those rigid ideologies and defensive postures that make us brittle and isolate us.In their place, Keene invites a state of being “complicated by contradiction,” of becoming “more tenderly entire with one another. ” This is the hard work of empathy, of holding multiple, conflicting truths at once—a skill as rare and essential as a perfect harmony.For Keene, a celebrated voice in American letters and a winner of the National Book Award, this poetic vision is deeply connected to seeing clearly. To love the world more deeply, we must first see its “variousness” in full, unflinching color—the injustice alongside the joy, the history of pain woven into the present moment of connection.

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