reflection: spare crop / fleet mind
Dette digt er forsvundet fra denne blog. Det kan findes i bogen af Christian Stokbro-Karlsen – “FJERNARKIV”
at læse Christians blog på dansk, klik HER.
The written version of this poem has disappeared from this blog.
To listen to a reading of this poem in English, click on the player below:
to hear more poetry by Christian Stokbro Karlsen in translation, click HERE.
to read Christian’s blog in Danish, click HERE.
Christan Stokbro Karlsen
copyright 2011,
all rights reserved
The written version of this poem has disappeared from this blog. To hear a reading of this poem, click on the player below:
Find the written version on Benjamin Norris’ blog, click HERE.
To read more poetry and fiction by Benjamin Norris, click HERE.
To read the short fiction piece that expands on the theme of this poem, click HERE.
The written version of this poem has disappeared from this blog. Find a reading and a link to other work by this poet below:
To listen to a reading of this poem, click on the player below:
To hear Tim Seibles giving a talk on poetry, including readings of his work click HERE.
To find Tim Seibles’ newly published book Fast Animal click HERE.
This poem originally appeared in the book Body Moves Corona Publishing
As I mentioned in the previous post, poetry serves as a bridge across time and culture, carrying the author’s ‘voice’ across generations and places but what about the gesture, the language of the body? Will the YouTube video that I posted, or all of those digital photos carefully placed in albums on my hard drive, and on Face Book, last as long as an inscription on a clay tablet? As you read this sentence and I write it we both know that the answer is already, emphatically no. Yet, gesture does seem to have a life of its own…
When my daughter was tiny I noticed that her hands made shapes that I recognized from images of both Byzantine and Hindu art; I called them ‘baby mudras’. Where did these miniature, elegant gestures come from?
Those tiny conical fingers, with their slender tips and chubby bases that, for my husband and I, recalled 10 little Campari Soda bottles, eventually grew longer and more slender. One day, having eaten some toast at the kitchen table, my then two year old began sweeping crumbs along the yellow Formica surface and into the open face of her cupped palm. I recognized the gesture immediately as my mothers and only later caught my own hands in the act. So, from where had my mother received this gesture and just how old was it?
Although it is impossible to know either the source of the ‘baby mudra’ or the genealogy of that peculiar arc of the fingers as they sweep up crumbs, the questions scratched at that vague itch for meaning that seems so basic to being human.
Gestures that gives words wings, gestures that give wings to what cannot be said with words – evoking only questions; then there are the gestures that are meant to express something but somehow end up clanking emptily. Futile, hollow gestures…
“Written words, from the days of Sumerian tablets, were meant to be pronounced out loud, since the signs carried implicit, as if it were their soul, a particular sound. The classic phrase scripta manet, verba volat –– which has come to mean, in our time, ‘what is written remains, what is spoken vanishes into air’ –– used to express the exact opposite; it was coined in praise of the word said out loud, which has wings and can fly…”
Alberto Manguel from
A History of Reading
When IPM-2MXI closed last year I was thinking, as I often do, about how poetry serves as a bridge across time and culture. I was thinking back to poetry readings that I had done and that I had attended. I have vivid memories of a writers workshop sponsored by my high school where, among others, Max Apple, Frank H. Schaefer, and Tim Seibles came to read their work and talk about writing with interested students. We were lucky.
Funny thing is, what has stuck with me for thirty-odd years, is less what they had to say about writing (sorry guys) but their physical presence, the sound of their voices: how their bodies bore their words. Gesture: Max Apple, his narrow shoulders folded in, glanced up at the auditorium of expectant students and smiled before looking down at the podium and reading from The Oranging of America and Zip along with a poem about wanting visitation rights with his ex-wife’s breasts. His nasal, northern voice held back half of a laugh. Frank Schaefer, whose laconic, matter-of-fact tone somehow matched the arch of his bushy eyebrows and the way his arms swung from his shoulders, read from The Ghosts of Elkhorn and spoke to us about ballads and the art of story-telling. Tim Seibles, whose deep, impassioned voice matched the sweep of his arms, gave his words wings as he read Double Dutch, The Leap, and Big Mouth from his first book that was then yet to be published: Body Moves.
Years later I found that slender volume of Tim Seibles poetry in a bookshop and recognized his photo on the back cover. Inside the book were the poems he’d read, lots that he hadn’t, and the sound of his voice double-exposed over the written words. That book found it’s way into my apartment here in Northern Italy and makes part of the inspiration for this year’s theme. But of course there’s more…
