Word & Ear: Beckett, Markson, Olson, Louis Armstrong, Calvino, Argueta, Kafka, Cid Corman [by suggestion] & Miss Pond's Oyster. . . ,

There's a lone sentence in the novella Che that speaks from the forest and the tundra in the same moment: "To realize, of course, is to give word." The line is its paragraph's only voice, so to speak (there are also other one line paragraphs in the novella but they are the rarity). I suppose, in this context (one word, one breath; one space of time), I've been thinking about David Markson (his brilliant and lovely, I think, This Is Not A Novel)--and Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar (a favorite of mine since roughly 1985). With these, I've been re-reading passages of William Empson's opposite-of-critical Seven Types of Ambiguity. Empson "states a case" in the way inventive novels do, in the way most poems do; the way a garden does! When a person pursues his or her own construct(s), a person enacts the daily renewal that would seem to sustain their thinking, engagement, sense in place. I've been editing the next Across Borders journal and I came across this line, in a musician's assessment of Louis Armstrong's writing using Charles Olson's perspective: "verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisition of his ear and the pressure of his breath" and "of the breathing of the man who writes as well as his listening." This last part interests me the most and refers to something else I had written on this blog ("on" this! --as if this is the deck of a boat, yes?) but which I cannot exactly call to mind without having two computers before me (one can only "jump" back and forth so much in one mode, one mind, one time-frame). So we listen to the hand, the hand remaining, the slate given and to wipe clean.

When we listen to what we read we read it again, instantaneously with slight echo, and we hear the breath of the voice--not only the artifact of the word.

Lately I've been reading passages of the novella "in Irish," in my Irishness, realizing a fluency--or maybe a result of a tendency, aural inclination, propensity--from an influential time in my life. Teaching, to the extent the writer teaches, Beckett brought the joy of the realization of each word (as a lengthy music, in each breath, bearing--) back, entirely. The emotional lyricism, the traveling melody within the smallest units of narrative, the breath-pause--which is the mental-emotional-ontological pause--become fully comprehended only as a listener. The writer is a listener, choosing her or his words sound by sound--and not unlodged from the sound of bay, the solid of mountain base, and yet willingly giving that up for the sake of getting on, to travel in the line or the narrative, to tell the parts of it--in melody and refrain--as a body with eyes and ears and lungs does. This is the kind of text I mean. If text had skin, brain, chemical; it "gives" if we are open to listening for that. Like Kafka's hunger artist below the straw, barely heard and--until then, at the end the whisper confirmed--completely unseen (in fact, thought to be disposable).

While a listener (and reader) at a cello lesson, I found a book I'd not seen or opened before: One Day of Life by Manlio Argueta. What I was able to read there, in the moments of music, were these (and I certainly hear their breath): "The dog is my brother." "A cloud is wrestling with the sun." "Until you appeared. . .you have brought fresh air."

You have to get and bring fresh air. You do it in living, why not do it in reading.

I listen to the lungs of text.

I was stopped in "my tracks" when I read Markson's lone line (among many there), repeating history--without any feeling of being dated: "Please, sir, I want some more."

The words ask a simple request. The writer lived-dying in this simple moment of request, line by line, word by word, syllable by syllable, sound by sound, breath by breath.

In this morning's paper a person writes to complain about children using "frozen trout" for an art project (prints) at a local public library. "In this economy!" the citizen chides. I have to admit to admiring the letter writer's name. It is "Pond." I want to write to her, via the paper, saying, "Dear Miss Pond, The word is your oyster"--(["hoist ear!"]; Why not world and word at the same time? It's possible!); and a painted fish is an opportunity in a child's imagination. This will feed nations, eons, even the embers. And so, we take a breath. Breathe, and listen to what breathed. Make a life of this. Discover text, breathing.

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.

Soon to be published, finally, the Underground novella Che.

It's a foggy morning in Vermont.  My head is in this too, waking.  The fog--a mass from San Francisco it would seem, a screen ready for a daytime movie, is set now on top of my mountain behind me and shows only a strip of trees like footlights (remember footlights?) around the bottom--where ankles would be if the mountain were human.  The California coffee I had this past hour is too strong, a rare thing, for this body did not take in enough water yesterday, while proofing Che.  Now I'm watching a documentary on Iran, from Link TV--vital to me, over these past years, since 2001 (in part this connectivity set me on my international journey, and the bridge from poetry to fiction--which you'll feel, I hope, in the landscapes or threads of Che.; but, also, I am easily reminded of my own travels, just out of college, when each glance held a word, words, and all was sensual before it was intellectual).

Trails From The East, this is called (the film I've got on).  I have another book (other than Che.) I need to get back to, new poems by Saadi Yous[s]ef.  Sinan Antoon and I have passed these poems back and forth.  We hope, with Saadi's encouragement long established, we'll bring these poems to you soon. And it is Saadi, and "the East", that brought me to Che.:  A Novella In Three Parts in the first place.

Traveling to India and Egypt, New Zealand, Australia, Spain, Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Ireland, and many places near and between, I knew the world "out beyond" my borders was an essential world (in language, drama, "punctuation")--and one layered with experience that was kindred, tempting, and alluring in both sad and gorgeous ways.  In Vermont, the mountain in my town "rises"--like a stranger, or a location to the traveler (think Calvino)--"out of nowhere."  My traveling, then, is always present:  the mountain is a pyramid, it's a tsunami, it's an altar, it's as it was this morning a blank screen--an obliteration, a bride's fabric, closed eyes, a sheet of paper.

The underground novella that emerged in 2006 with twisted paperclip bindings and then became a tiny perfect bound paperback in an edition of only a hundred is now being brought out--in all three sections (for the first time) by BlazeVOX Books.

Che. is friendship(s) through language.  Not controversy but content.  Visceral in subject and a daydream among intimates.  

If poetry were fiction this is what it would look like, in which the possibilities outlast the barriers.

Look for Che.:  A Novella In Three Parts by Peter Money this fall from BlazeVOX Books (www.blazevox.org)--soon.

Thanks, and please spread the Lit.

Archived info & interview:  http://www.cervenabarvapress.com/PeterMoneyinterview.htm