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!

Left Bank reading & reviews, comments & my "clarification"

Recent readers compare the experience to Marilynne Robinson and William Gass. (I went out and got a book by Robinson to see.)

Let me just say: the "double hyphen dash" and the regular solid strike dash are used in my text with reason. Pacing and utterance have to do with it.

And regarding epigraphs: the choices and the placement/phrasing/crediting are every bit as important to the text as the text. What allows the text and what supports the text is universal, but it is all personal. Flux and form: equal parts important. Otherwise we wouldn't be here.

See you at Manchester and The Mountain on Friday.

Thanks to all who bought the book at Southern New Hampshire University and Left Bank Books Saturday & Tuesday.

April Events

I'll be at Left Bank Books, Hanover NH, Tuesday April 20th w/ Andrea Cohen, 7:30
Then: April 17 11am SNHU for NHWP festival and
April 23 & 24 at VT's Manchester Literary Fest.
On the 27th I host for the Norwich Bookstore at NPL.
Come on by!