Category: poetry

Every Lifted Voice

Why the singing.

Now a manifesto, now jazz, now a love lyric; through these voiceprints of language now the witness takes a stand. Another stirs the mischief of the multitudes within each vibrating body of this vast and trembling We.

The point? Only this. Create a landscape wide enough to hold the simultaneous becoming dance of each and all, from the last beginning to the next. Any tent will tear against the strain.

But what do you need? Only to feel tended to and left well enough alone. You might try taking scissors to these pages, and then make a world to hold.

To hold us? That too.

What are you doing? This art is simply a protest. Against the dying off.

***

“Voiceprints of language” is a phrase June Jordan once used to describe poetry.

In Defiance of Taste

For the wild uglies.

What crawls and flies far from clean in its joy is often the subject of revulsion, but some forms of rage are raw enough to keep a crawling body painted with mud, and ripe enough with love to offer flight. One held nothing back of substance and much of detail and familiar story lines, to keep each mouthful tasting fully of itself. Eat, she said, there is enough for everyone, but cautioned that some would find at first bite, something raw enough to break the heart. It broke mine, she said, but then came a challenging joy. This angered some, but creatures of the earth are often hated for not making themselves more pleasing, more beautiful, for living just as they are.

Ceiling to Sky

With June Jordan.

You had some nerve, some told you, to speak love into the war, to flaunt that voluptuous hope in all her fullness, wearing not a stitch of modesty. Not even cynicism, or nihilism; neither was she utopian, and although they tried to call her ignorant, her brilliance shone.

They urged you to cover her up, but you wanted to let her dance. You gave her new songs and the earthquake moved you, the way every atom of life and its killing was suddenly known in the leaning faces of strangers.

Coming clean in a disaster is still a possibility, you insisted, and dreamed a blues to meet the moment when the ground breaks itself open, dreamed it a birth breaking open, a mouth to catch a final breath and release––and what came forth from that exhalation? They asked you about your aim and you told them. I aim to make love a reasonable possibility.

***

Inspired by Josh Kun’s (1995) BOMB interview with June Jordan, discussing the libretto she wrote for I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky (with composer John Adams).

Suggestions

For working with words.

No need to transcribe the experience when it’s already there; not unless that’s what you’re after. Even then, it might elude. But you’re after something else, aren’t you? No, it isn’t a release valve for emotion, either. Perhaps a vessel for their distillation? Or to save a life. Or to give shape to one that you mean to bring forth by looking. Or to keep a record of attention in an effort to witness this becoming. To call it out, over and again, finding it stranger at each turn. A silence opens.

***

The last line comes from the title of a poetry collection by Amy Clampitt.

Between Stations

Songs in transit.

Each meeting was a new territory, and the faces of strangers became unfamiliar markers in a foreign land. We watched her absorb these, making and remaking an atlas of the terrain. To the music in her chest, we pressed our ears. In this, we heard a place we knew well. In the corners of our childhood play, the strings, and then came the drums of our chase. The horns called us to birthday feasts, and the chorus resounded, singing us–––not home, but somewhere entirely new. A place we leaned into. In this way, she peeled us from the scripts of our nightmares and offered new arrangements of light and space, of time. Embraced by her shadows, we prepared to arrive.

We the Unclean

Singing lessons with dirt.

After we saw that having was out of the question––as in, anything in our possession, including accomplishment, it eventually became clear that none of us would be clever enough, quick enough, or hard-working enough to be the brilliant exception.

At the school of roots, we learned of purity, that it was possible under certain conditions. We learned the conditions, but the dirt kept on.

We played in it, laughing with the unclean birds above us and their songs called us out.

The Staying Power

A conversation on creating.

She explained that none of this will offer any useful defenses against death, health, or inclement weather. That it has nothing to do with a feeling of faith, that the time to stay often happened when faith was shaken. On the task at hand, she said hold. She said, create.

By way of encouragement, she said no, you will not get over it and no, you will not decide that you can go on.

Why, then? one of us asked. She laughed. I invite you and now you need a reason?

Shaking her head, she turned and walked out, leaving the door open. 

Inheritance

In the land of time and space.

There are those who are so much time, who live primarily by movements through and in and around space. Then there are those who are full of space, whose movements are through and in and around time. Each group has a special way of ordering and knowing the fluctuations of the other. Each is friend, antagonist, and carrier to the other. In their constantly shifting dynamic, these groups are inseparable. 

Watch the tree. She marks time in her rings and by the turn and fall of her leaves. The fruits of her body are eaten and carried, stored, and adopted by those who move into and around and through her. They know themselves by these movements and she knows herself by holding them. Notice the wind, whose very being is movement, singing his force through her branches, stretching her sway to his song.

We, the children of Time and Space, are the natural carriers of both traits, and the flux between them plays out within and between us. Now we are winds, now trees; here like a bird, here like the whale, here like the ocean floor, the bed of the lake, where the embryonic futures of our spaces settle until hatching from the cells that hold them still before the swimming.

Encounter

A meeting with the art.

There is the event, what occurs after, and what will be remembered; what is in the frame and what beyond it, who stands beholding, and what presents itself, as composition.  The artist tries presenting Time as concrete. For example, here’s a calendar and it can repeat endlessly without naming the century. Following these questions out, and out, and out, she creates a dizzying array of images, depicting a history. The effect is a sense of overwhelm, a sense of being tiny by comparison, crushed by the scope and depth of it all. Some will retreat immediately. For those that remain, there are other effects to come, and one of these is a certain euphoria of spirit, suddenly released from certain presumptions about its individual weight.

***

Inspired by the work of Hanne Darboven.

The Flamekeeper

With Czeslaw Milosz.

You asked how to survive in a ruined world. Your answer was a series of confrontations: with experience, with history, with the paradoxes of humanness. You would hunt these, not to eat but to offer as food upon your return. If writing is faith, how can you do it amidst the screams of the tortured, the imprisoned, the babies? You meant to answer, keeping witness with your pen in the faint light of your constant faith in a city without a name, writing a song for the end of the world. In times of crisis, you said, everyone becomes a poet.

***

Inspired by the life and work of Czeslaw Milosz.