The written version of this poem has disappeared. If you’re wondering why, click HERE.
To listen to the podcast, click on the player below:
Tag: Art
there is no first word: by Paul Squires
The written version of this poem has disappeared from this archive. If you’re wondering why, click HERE.
To listen to a podcast of this poem, click on the player below:
Listen to Paul reading his own work for the NPR broadcast: WORDSALAD
Read more of Paul’s work at GINGATAO including interesting and playful thoughts about translation of cross-cultural metrical requirements in this POST.
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Testimonio: by Bonnie McClellan
TESTIMONIO
Awake I break and chip this language
As if I am trying to bang out acanthus leaves with
The blunt face of a five pound sledge;
Just call me:
Grazia, (a Dio).
Full of sleep I slide into the Jungian upper room,
Strike the uncomprehending Pentecostal match and speak:
Wet words,
Wavelets around boats that ply
Apostolic present perfect street.
My dreams blink and smile:
Untranslatable.
Stout woman in a flowered dress.
Flash of thread.
Globe of sky,
Unspinning.
Offers, unclouded
Not the world
But the breath of it:
Planetarium.
Water stands suspended within
Bright still chaos of oxygen
Where swallows weave with crosséd paths
Nets anchored round scattered signal taps.
Antennae of the televisions
Buoy mark this random ocean.
From rooftop to rooftop
(da tetto a tetto).
Test a mon io.
Click on the audio player below to hear a reading of this poem:
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La Poeta: by Chris Fillebrown
Mon Reale/Mason’s Eucharist: by Bonnie McClellan
IPM 2MX…What’s in a flash event? Would a blog by any another name sound as sweet?
Tip of the hat to Galileo…The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.
I’m standing in the kitchen with my sweetheart, we’re making dinner, the girl is circling our legs like a small, very talkative shark:
“So, you’re going to leave the poetry up.” he says.
“No, I’m putting it up from the 1st of February until the 28th. On the first of March it all disappears,” I reply, shifting around the green beans and bacon in the bottom of the cast iron skillet.
“But your other poetry, you’re leaving that up?”
“Yeah, the stuff from the regular blog will stay. But the work from International Poetry Month will go. The poem posted on Feb. 1st will be available for the whole 28 days. The poem posted on the 28th will be up for 24 hours. I’m going to leave the audio recordings of the readings on the site.”
“So why take the blog posts down, to make it more of an EVENT?”
About now, our girl is at the height of her performance and frantically switching back and forth between being Captain Hook and a baby goat. I am now Wendydarling…Captain Hook wants to give me a kiss but only if I pretend I’m a crocodile eating his hand…no wait, now we’re supposed to bonk heads and say ‘maaaaa’. The stuff in the pan is starting to smell good but it does that right before it starts to burn. I struggle with managing the traffic in my mental train yard while I think about my response,
“Well, yeah. You know, we talk about how people post a zillion links on FB, there are 5 stories you mean to read on the news sites, not to mention the infinite list of things we’ve been meaning to google… and we think, ‘Oh yeah, when I have a minute I’ll check that out but right now (insert favorite and perfectly valid excuse here)….’
Our assumption is that the content will always be available. I want people to feel that they have something to lose if they don’t go and look now. It’s not just that; it’s also because I want this to be a microcosmic, super-fast-acting mirror of what history does to poetry.”
My sweetheart hands me a glass of wine, my daughter bangs her head into my leg with enough force to fell a small pine tree.
“In what sense?” he wonders (meanwhile scanning the BBC Homepage and clicking through the iTunes playlist; and he says he can’t multitask…)
My mental ‘poetry train’ is rambling through the landscape of old thoughts, essays I wrote about writing 5 years ago, the link about the history of books that a friend posted this morning, and the submissions that I’ve been organizing for this month:
“How many poets were writing at the same time as Sappho or ‘Homer’? Was she really the best? Time washes through, consumes everything and spits out the bones. We have the luxury of instantaneous access to information so that we think that we don’t need to remember anything…we google it and then forget it.”
“So, why leave up the podcasts…why not delete it all?”
“In the beginning there was the word. The roots of poetic form grew from the soil of the human voice; metre and rhyme began as mnemonic functions, which were only much later codified as written forms. The way in which the English speaking world views the work of western literature’s first poet (or poets) ‘Homer’ is not a result of his composing on the page but the culmination of the labour of Greek writers who transcribed the works, later translations into Latin, and much later translations into other European languages and then to English…who knows how much this work mutated before it was codified? Isn’t that beautiful to think about?”
I realize that now I’m sounding and feeling a hopelessly ‘wordnerdish’. How do I convey how important I think it is to listen…with attention or the joy I have playing with words in poetic form and reading the work of others who are doing the same? It’s like the fun Galileo had searching the sky, drawing diagrams, and rolling objects of different weights down an inclined plane; or like the pleasure of a child playing with sand and water on the beach, making dams of shells, digging channels, making order out of chaos, knowing that it will all be erased by the tide and not caring.
“So you’re going to explain this to people…write a curatorial statement beforehand right?”
“Umm, yeah…I guess that’s another ‘naptime project’.” my daughter tries to wriggle in between my legs and the stove.
He laughs, “Naptime Projects, sounds a good title.”
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International Poetry Month: Submit to the Word!
Starting on February 1st and ending on February 28th…a month long flash poetry event. One poem a day for 28 days and then they dissappear, maybe forever…
“I wonder if Dante would smile to know that,
reading his words aloud
(as they used to long ago),
a future poetess would blush to feel
the smooth white marble of his tercets
trace their dust across the center of her tongue?”
How ironic (or bizarre) would Dante or Sappho find it to think of a 21st century reader/writer, reading, parsing, and borrowing from his or her work; women in pants, men in pants!…all speaking a strange, barbaric language and with access to technology that makes words instantly available to millions.
I am both a passionate reader and a passionate writer. I believe that writing serves two excellent functions: it works as a tool to help both the reader and the writer digest, formulate, and reconsider ideas; and, it works as a creative discipline that binds the ephemeral nature of experience to the architecture of words. What we are writing now is a bridge. Who knows how long it will last or who will cross it? Let’s find out.
The time has come to ask for submissions for International Poetry Month! I will post ten of my poems which are the nucleus of a new book that I’m working on with poems inspired by music, cadences, and stories that have been used as vessels for conveying both cultural information and emotive content. For this year’s celebration of poetry I am looking for work that is inspired by the work of others (using borrowed materials for a new construction) or where the form/structure is related to the content (or both)…interpretation of these guidelines will be liberal.
So…lets build something. In addition to my 10 poems I will post a selection of original poetry submitted to me between Jan. 22nd and February 10th of 2010. Please submit your poetic brick (or stone or mortar or slender flash of lath sustaining a fluttering bit of rice paper) to:
bmcclellan.lapoeta@gmail.com
Happy reading and hope that you enjoy International Poetry Month! Submissions in any language will be considered. Needless to say, all rights to works published for International Poetry Month will remain with the author.
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Don’t Fence Me In…NaNoWriMo begins tommorow!
Okay, tomorrow November begins and I’m going to start writing, a new novel, the rest of the old novel, I don’t know yet and that’s part of the fun. I think that I dreamt about 5 plot-lines last night. This post is titled: Don’t Fence Me In exactly because of that freedom; I consider myself a serious essayist and poet but this month gives me the opportunity to relax and have fun, to be silly, and to chase any idea I would like for the next month without the burden of worrying whether or not it meets my professional writing standards. I encourage anyone who has the vaguest interest in writing to dive in and play for the month of November. Below are the links to my page on the site and the home page itself. Hope to see you there. Happy Halloween!
CLICK HERE TO START READING MY NEW NOVEL: THE KEYSTONE
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Seated Nude Speaks Up
Now is the time
I play the game
of let’s pretend
that you’re all here
to draw my face.
At this moment,
before beginning,
I still have hope that you all
will not
randomly cut off
my head.
my hands.
my feet.
Do you mean to perform
these amputations or
is it fear and lack of skill
that leave my multi-copied, uni-facet self
speechless.
unable to grasp a fork;
helpless to walk away
or even cast an angry,
or tired,
or curious glance
back at you.
You,
all diligent charcoal and eraser
perfecting the sine curve
from my armpit
to my breast
as if
it could
divorce
my breath.
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La (Nuova) Fontana a Cannobio
Here are the pictures and the story of the fountain that Matthew carved for the piazza across the lake at Cannobio. We both agree that it looks somewhat like a Baroque Bidet but it matches the Church perfectly! The story below coincides with that which we heard from the Vescovo of the church who kindly allowed us to approach the altar and view the original painting and invited us for the festival in January. The fountain that Matthew made replaces one from the 18th century that was stolen while it was dismounted for a repaving of the piazza that was done in 2004. A photo of the original fountain is below.
The marble that the ‘new’ fountain was carved from is the pink ‘Candoglio’ which is reserved exclusively for the big cathedral in Milan…but, you know, Italian style, somebody knew somebody who could get a piece donated for this church. Matthew said that it was a pleasure to work with this stone that he would otherwise never have carved. I should have asked him for a scrap of it for the rock garden on the dashboard of my van. It is really lovely to think that he made something that, even if it’s small, should still be there in 100 years, probably more. It certainly makes us feel invested in the community.
The story of the Church of the S.S. Pietà in Cannobio and of it’s miraculous relic is as follows:
The Sanctuary of the Most Holy Pietà
The Sanctuary of The Most Holy Pietà, that stands behind the beautiful promenade of Cannobio, was commissioned by San Carlo Borromeo in about 1578 and was built on the site of a pre-existing modest Church.It was precisely here between the 8th of January and the 27th of February 1522 that a miraculous event took place: in a humble inn, a small painting that depicted the deposition of Christ from the Cross between the Madonna and St. John the Evangelist had “come to life”, blood and tears were coming out of the painting and a fragment of human rib was sticking out from the chest.
Today, the small painting and some blood-soaked clothes belonging to those who witnessed the events, are preserved in a niche in the high altar of the Sanctuary, whereas the Holy Rib is preserved in a reliquary in the Church of San Vittore.The building has a single nave, with a rectangular apse and an elegant dome, which was the work of the architect Pietro Beretta. The rich internal decorations date back to the 17th and 18th centuries: there are paintings, stucco and polychrome marbles.
The most valuable work is undoubtedly the altarpiece of the high altar. This is an oil on wood, which depicts the Climb to Calvary and was executed around 1540 by the renowned artist Gaudenzio Ferrari. Beneath the presbytery there is a crypt that since 1947 has been the resting place of the deserving Don Silvio Gallotti from Cannobio.Each year, on the evening of the 8th of January (and in a less evocative manner, also on the Monday of Pentecost), there is a traditional religious ceremony, which brings the “Holy Rib” from the Parish Church of San Vittore to the Sanctuary of the Most Holy Pietà. The holy rib is brought in a procession that is lit up by hundreds of lights placed in the windows of the houses.
Bonnie McClellan-Broussard 