Poet of the Week: Tennessee Williams
I spent a majority of my time this weekend interviewing people about the impending apocalypse, and watching clips on YouTube from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman, so the poem I’m posting below is especially timely.
I never knew that Tennessee Williams was a poet. I actually probably did, but I don’t think about Tennessee Williams very much at all, and I’ve never been the biggest fan of his mostly misogynistic, very heavily monologue-centric plays, not even when they’re read by a steely blue-eyed, stiff and cruel Paul Newman.
But I loved his poem in last week’s New Yorker. I found it to be both strangely nihilistic, and horribly romantic, in a way that appeals to my sick desire for both true love and the end of humanity.
So, from the depths of Tennessee’s dark, assumedly Cold War affected mind—a 1950s tainted fear of nuclear annihilation reeks through the stanzas—comes “Your Blinded Hand.”
