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We New Englanders only have Yuri for a few days more. SanFranwhammy beckons.
He has a new quartet up. I plan to spend some time with these poems this week. Something in them that strikes a nerve--the not-so-funny bone--as we get ready to move house here in Gloucester, but something more to them too.
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Bought Brenda Iijima's Spacious (last copy there) & the teenytinymag Bling Bling today at the 108 Gallery's Yart Sale. Thanks Mark. {Thanks Brenda & Michael too.} Spacious is especially perfect for this springtime. Somehow, though it's a windy early evening, "Succulent stems, still no breeze. Dying toward light / or being full-blown" {wink wink} seems spot on given my innerlife, the spring that cometh, & the newz on the wavez.
It's always better to give into a poem that begins (as if reading me): "A newsworthy segment: / where the battle ready are decoys. / That which is described as such: / 'Where do they stand' and "'inked to...'"
Not since Throwing Muses "Hate My Way" & Xtina's untitled ms. (watch for it!) has something so struck me where-I'm-at straightaway. {Xtina seems tuned (to borrow from Spicer) to some of the same extraterrestrial stations that visit my transistor but she gets both more signals & better reception... Where-I'm-at but 4- or 5-D & so to speak of the depth of my feeling, especially for certain moments of this ms., would be limiting.}
Other things have moved me--or forced me to move--which is another matter altogether. & after that opening Brenda's poem does move on me & so too I must move. It goes somewhere which is not where-I'm-at but which gets me looking at things. Gets me seeing things...in both senses of that phrase. Her lines undulating thickly, spring-like, viscous {like the end of Boston's Muddy River, yellow pollen covered in the best of years} Check this:
"To sit quietly amid the flux. Record slipping
transitions. The life she leads:
pattern of daily compilation and lemonad squeezed yesterday
a vital replenishment, enduring a heat more viscous than plasma. Generic
to call this a womb or an elastic, expanding room that grows of itself in greens
blues and browns. Idling in expansion.
Flat plank of page.
Flanked by horizon."
So much sound & sight to talk about. Ah the lines! But too little time. Back to work.
~
slainte
Jamie