The Moths, The Waves: Woolf, Olsen, Winterson

So I'm back at the gallery in Lebanon, looking at Henrieke I. Strecker's tiny rendering of "a wave" last night (two weeks prior to bringing my poetry class)--also taking in Michaela D'Angelo's almost overpowering canvases (and the allure & affinity of her titles: "and they continued", "the sheltering", "and they all went to heaven in a little row boat", "everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die" [a counter balance to a kind of broadside I've kept from the 80s by John Giorno], a bundle of flowers ["detritus"] slathered into a glob of concrete pigment of itself resting inside the blue paint on top of the canvas); . . . in the gallery, also, are my friend Rachel's radiant and--in the overlap of slap-on-shape & dayglo peeking--defiant new prints. I'm there and starting to post on Twitter (twitter.com/poetpetermoney) affinities from Strecker's artist's statement--and this morning I realize the //s 'tween it and what Winterson wrote in Art [Objects]. And now I'm planning my evening course, in World Lit., and I crack open Tillie Olsen's Silences and arrive, basically, exactly where Winterson had me, cloth in hand, pen a beat away: p.159-- quoting from Woolf's diary, "slowly ideas began trickling in. . . the Moths, which I think I will write very quickly. . . . the play-poem idea; the idea of some continuous stream, not of solely human thought, but of the ship, the night etc. all flowing together: intersected by the arrival of the bright moths"; later: "I shape a page or two; and make myself stop"--where there is the "ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall; and "I write nonsense. . . variations. . . possibilities; . . . Then I trust to some inspiration on re-reading. . . I press to my centre" and "I begin to see what I had in my mind. . . One wave after another."

Survive, you, survive, text, sur vive, be done--and do these more,

from Ecstasy And Energy: Winterson on Poetry & Prose

In case you needed the reminder, "Reading is sexy." (p. 192, Art [Objects], by Jeanette Winterson, *1996*);. . . insert enlivening, to be sublime, sentient, mortal.

(Every generation, no?): "For an experimenter these are hard times"; "We are insecure and cynical and this makes us hostile to experiment." --Yet [here's goodness]: "Must poetry be on one side and prose on the other? Not historically, not necessarily. . .part of the interest in . . . Modernism [is] an interest in. . . flexibility of form" (190). "Of course prose handles mundane matter so much more graciously than poetry can" (190)

"What I do know is that it is desirable now to break down the assumed barriers between poetry and prose. . . .What else does Shakespeare do in his plays?" (191 ).

"It is for a new generation that I write" writes Winterson. Always the new, it must be, always the new: even for tired old eyes; there's another breath, isn't there? Another wag, cup of something, --interest. We warm to the fact.

Amazon review: Fascinating & Beautiful; . . . & I'm grateful.

Five Stars, here's an excerpt from the first Amazon review: "Fascinating and beautiful book written thoughout with intensity. . . not like a French prose poem. . . but with the effect of poetry. . . I was enthralled from beginning to end."

I like to think Che is more sustained than the French prose poems I've admired.

The Reader's Potentials: Well-known translator's take on Che.

A friend & translator writes, "still, and again, engrossed in the masterfulness of 'Che' language. It is a rare thing in prose
these days that a writer does not write 'to the reader' but to the art of creating something that makes a reader re-visit his own potentials."

Of course I'm grateful for what's said there.

Re-reading the epigraphs to section three, Acolyte, this morning I realized, again, just how important those are to the text--and revealing in the order and way in which they amount. I hope they are "permission" and "affinity" both, and more. I read them as a kind of Greek Chorus, preluding each section of Che.

Hadestown benefit for Harbor Mountain Press: Blew Minds to Venus, Honey.

Stunned and amazed in front of Anais Mitchell's--and Michael Chorney's, Geza Carr, Nelson Caldwell & Polly Vanderputten [double frig' cellos!!], Rob Morse, Adam Moss and Andrew Moroz's--spot-lit amped and nuanced acoustical performance of their thumpin' rag-time jazzy rock musical, with impeccable drawn-in woodsy campfire storytelling execution & cunning acts of redemption, sultry-felt enlivening, in their folk opera, Hadestown, Saturday at Town Hall Theater in Woodstock, VT. Every note, every knee wiggle & wag, drum lean & upright bass sag in the shadow of rim of stage light, each sound fired from a myth that's part of everyone. Somehow this has a lot to do with _Che._, I feel it skin to skin, sure as sun dries what yesterday's showers left--this springing. Damn, May's fine. . . .

P.S. Thanks BTC Bend Oregon!