A Poem And The Sounding This Pascha

Poem

The mouth

the eyes two

my finger tips

place inside the space

the architecture of sound

I'm listening to Zelenka this Pascha

sounding my affect

I'm telling my friend it's passion

but it's really the sound of breaking

two

Points in a wave

an arrangement of sorts

the water of sound finds the hairline crack

the lowest point

the raja and the octave

the one and the all.

FT-Lynch, Easter 2019

***

The following is a poem from Be With, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.

The Sounding

What closes and then
luminous? What opens
and then dark? And into
what do you stumble
but this violet
extinction? With
froth on your lips.
8:16 a.m. The morning’s
sleepy face

rolls its million
eyes. Migrating flocks
of your likesame species
incandesce
into transparency.
A birdwatcher lifts

her binoculars. The con-
tinuous with or without
your words
situates you here
(here (here)) even while
you knuckle your eyes
in disbelief. Those

voices you love (human
and not), can you
hear their echoes
hissing away like
fiery scale
from an ingot hammered
on some
blacksmith’s anvil?
And behind those
voices, what is that
blowing
the valves of your ears open
as black rain,
not in torrents, but
ceaselessly comes
unchecked out of everywhere
with nothing
to slacken it.

Comments

Philip Levine's Acid Rage - They Lion (lie and) Grow

THEY FEED THEY LION by Philip Levine (1968) Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, Out of black bean and wet slate bread, Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, They Lion grow. Out of the gray hills Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride, West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties, Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps, Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch, They Lion grow. Earth is eating trees, fence posts, Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones, "Come home, Come home!" From pig balls, From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness, From the furred ear and the full jowl come The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose They Lion grow. From the sweet glues of the trotters Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower Of the hams the thorax of caves, From "Bow

From Academy to the Street, From Poetry To Prose

From academy to the street, from poetry to prose - Nicanor Parra – ‘My own antipoems use this blank verse. I’ve often been asked what an antipoem is and the most frequent response I’ve given, without realising what I was saying is – “an antipoem is quite simple a dramatic utterance”, and a dramatic utterance, we would have to add, is a Shakespearean blank verse. Or rather, it is a hendecasyllable that lengthens and shortens, and that oscillates between the academy, the street and the fairground. I’ve always worked with these elements: I’ve even managed to combine verse with eleven syllables and one with one syllable, and verses with prose. I thought it was a great invention of mine, but the Elizabethans were already working with these methods – Shakespeare used them in King Lear , where a large percentage of the work is written in prose, without us fully knowing what is verse and what is prose. This is very important: we could say that they are prosaic verses, or poetic verse’

The Strange and Compelling Inner Life of Clarice Lispector

Dedication - Cuando a la casa del lenguaje se le vuela el tejado y las palabras no guarecen, yo hablo When the house of language has its roof blown off and words do not shelter, I speak - fellow Latin American writer and contemporary, Alejandra Pizarnik, "Fragmentos para dominar el silencio” (Fragments to overcome silence) --- “ALL THE WORLD BEGAN WITH A YES. ONE MOLECULE SAID YES TO ANOTHER MOLECULE and life was born. But before prehistory there was the prehistory of prehistory and there was the never and there was the yes. It was ever so. I don’t know why, but I do know that the universe never began. Make no mistake, I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort” - From The Hour Of The Star (1977) --- When I read Clarice, I’m reminded of Montaigne - "I continually observe myself, I take stock of myself, I taste myself … I roll about in myself” Maurice Merleau-Ponty described Montaigne as someone who put "a consciousness astonished

Aporetica

Search This Blog