A man named Saw Wai, author of love poems in Burmese, wrote a tiny valentine poem called “February the Fourteenth *,” which was published in a small journal in Myanmar last month. According to people who read Burmese, it was a kind of funny drippy poem. A couple of weeks after the poem appeared, though, Saw Wai was thrown in jail because, as can be the case with poetry, what appeared sappy wasn’t so sappy at all. “February the Fourteenth” was a hidden tiger of a poem. It celebrated collective action and the power of love, or read differently, the resilience of the human spirit in the face of control and violence. There was also the fact that, when read top to bottom, the first word of each line made an officially objectionable description of Than Shwe, the oppressive military ruler of the country. The words say: “Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe.”
An American poet named A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz heard this news and has put together with twelve contributors a small book of poems celebrating Saw Wai’s special valentine. The book is available here (PDF) and is of course called “Power Crazy Senior General Than Shwe.” All of the poems in it play with those words, some mimicking in English Wai’s first-word strategy, others doing more cryptic exercises, working the phrase in forward and backward and at angles. You could waste hours at the office or on the train or in bumper-to-bumper unraveling these gems.
Pamela Johnson Parker contributed the shortest work, something called “The Father Toasts His Daughter at Her Wedding”
Power comes from pleasing all the elements: air fire water earth.
Crazy to think how clutter causes bad weather, bad luck, bad money,
Senior-citizen diseases…. Daughter, better to have strings of diamonds, a
General net of them in your hair, than one hair out of place. No one’s neater
Than I, even though in a state document I once misspelled feng shui as “fung
Shwe.” I’m not sure I ever changed it—I like my own order.
It ain’t Jay Z and it ain’t Garcia-Lorca. But it’s good and maybe somehow it will all get back to Saw Wai, in that strange way poetry has of living instead of dying and sneaking past guards and through bricks and mortar and metal bars.
* Update: I added a link to a full annotated translation of Saw Wai’s poem. Thanks to A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz, writing in the comments section, for the heads up!
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Image: The cover of the magazine where the poem originally appeared. The BBC called the publication a “celebrity gossip magazine.”