Notes on A Guest Poet

Posted on August 1, 2004 in Poetry Prose Arcana

The last few months have been dry. I do not like most of the poetry I write and the stuff I have posted to the site doesn’t cut it, but that has always been throwaway. I am not alone in this feeling lost. I’ve watched maria likewise complain that the muse has left her. As for me, I have just not felt much in the mood to face my muse and I don’t know why. The only thing I can do is write every day and hope that the broken frame and splinters of what was my house of poetry find their joints again.

I made these notes while listening to a very fine poet the other night. His voice fascinated me.

The guest poet, a Ukrainian, speaks from his throat and off the roof of his mouth, his words jumping off the foam of his waves. Frothing and whining at the shore. Not the brat’s whimper of self-pity, but the song of an Odessa citizen, his feet nailed to the floor and yet still he dances, swaying to the music that comes from his own strings, plucked on the inside by something — some hybrid beast of sorrow and joy staggering on three legs across the separated clods of a pasture. A minotaur’s head tilted to the right as if distressed with an inner ear infection, eyes popping out, crusting over with conjunctivitis, but the mouth champing green grass and flowers. Register this. Mark the water pouring out of the pitcher, its flow, its clicks and clacks. In that icon you will see his voice, his blue, streaked-with-green, voice.