Hence all rhymes – A tribute to Joseph Brodsky
Edited by Specimen
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in memory of Joseph Brodsky
After a night in the shaky
but mysteriously comfortable guest room
bed, he materializes in the kitchen,
still only half awake.
“How’d you sleep? “Terrific.”
He sits at the table. Sips a cup
of black coffee, gets up, goes outside
for a smoke or two.
Returns a few minutes later, heads for
the fridge, opens it, stoops into its cold glow.
“I see ham. I see a chicken leg.
Do you have any meatballs?”
And with a grin adds,
“Times like this, nobody dies”.
Published May 19, 2026
© Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2025
Few poets lived by language in such a thorough and relentless way as Joseph Brodsky. Almost fanatically, frantically so. Ethically, insofar as ethics itself is mothered by aesthetics. Insofar as “language that is intolerant, and indifferent in a week to a beautiful physique, worships language and forgives anyone by whom it lives” Brodsky is still present, physically and linguistically so, thirty years after he disappeared in the dead of winter, on January 28th 1996, for all those who met him, textually or in person. Talking, standing next to a fridge or walking fast through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
Hence, few poets are so alive in other poets’ verse, are addressed so often as if present, because of their presence, in other poets’ poems. On the day of his birth, May 24th, Specimen publishes and translates some of these, conjuring Joseph’s presence through the verse, and the absence, of this most unique family of good poets, good friends, Seamus, Derek, Adam and Mark among them.
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