BERNEVAL

after Leslie Scalapino

observe experience

2 verbs
verb + noun

in one case there is a caesura between two equal injunctions; in the other, the object anneals any gap

And so for day 1889
14.02.2012

The opening of this poem reminds me of the liaison element in a play by Sky Gilbert, The Dressing Gown which Rick Bébout sums up beautifully: “The title named its key prop, perhaps even prime character: a robe passed from one man to the next, central player in a series of tricks.”

Here is Stephen J. Williams from Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets edited by Michael Farrell and Jill Jones

the dear departed
     lovers that have gone

angels that once terrified us
     — threatening to bring death

so near as love —
     sometimes return.

these lost lovers,
     whose provenance and history

is harder than a coin
     passing hand to hand

through all the dull business
     of the commonwealth,

arrive at our aching arms
     unexpected.

There is more to the poem. See “the dear departed [lovers that have gone]”

And so for day 1888
13.02.2012

Lee Cataldi gives us a Sapphic moment in the lyric “tears” — and by Sapphic we mean not only the content but also the manner…

your tears
are warm upon my face
would be
warmer on my thighs
your tears

the smoldering is from Out of the Box: Contemporary Australian Gay and Lesbian Poets edited by Michael Farrell and Jill Jones.

And so for day 1887
12.02.2012

She’s a difficult poet. Not because she is inaccessible. But because of the delight we take in examining the stitching dangerously makes us miss the hang of the garment. But not quite, we can and are expected to reread — the lyric or sequence is short enough to accommodate attention to both the fine detail and the overarching construction.

Who is she? What drives her art? Let’s listen in to Phoebe Wang in an interview published in the Brockton Writers Series blog.

Essentially I’m a lyric landscape poet, if I really wanted to put labels on myself. I like to write about things as a distance, and I tend to have an abstract, impersonal view of the world. But I think the most thrilling poems come out when I feel like I’m being backed into a corner. When I finished this series, this experiment, I did see that the “ekphrastic” label didn’t really fit. I had been writing in a very personal way all along, but suffered from a kind of myopia. So now when I’m writing a poem about fog or about a long walk in the neighborhood, I’m conscious of it being a very internal, private poem and not something separate from my psyche. Conversely, the harder I tried to represent my family as who they really are, they more archetypal they became.

BWS 14.09.16: Phoebe Wang
https://brocktonwritersseries.wordpress.com/2016/08/31/bws-14-09-16-phoebe-wang/

And let us juxtapose that with a blurb by David O’Meara to Phoebe Wang’s chapbook Occasional Emergencies

Phoebe Wang’s ekphrastic poems remind me that art is not just an object to be viewed passively but is an interaction, worth climbing inside and inhabiting.

Here, dwell upon these for a while.

We build so one of us
     might levitate

“The Tower” after Louis Gréaud [I], Centre Pompidou
Occasional Emergencies

The parliament of voices no longer sovereign
rehearses its next course of action

builds consensus by semitones and minor intervals.

“Feedback Loop” after Janet Cardiff, The Forty-Part Motet Occasional Emergencies

This haiku-like kenning has been purloined as our title:

luck-trampled clover

from “Manhunt” after Charlotte Posenenske, Prototype for a Revolving Vane
Occasional Emergencies

The poem in part about school children’s games becomes by its end a meditation on chance and the aleatory.

The bell collected us like a deck of cards
     face-up on the yard’s blank baize.

See what I mean by difficult? Doesn’t let you, dear reader, off the hook for your “connivence” as the French would say or simply complicity as the English might.

Take two lines (from “Guiding Lights” in Admission Requirements), precious in themselves by their working over a repetition to induce wave-action:

and waves worked toward the tideline
and the tideline aspired to its high water mark.

Which remembered stretch us into the mode of striving. Which reread in their context become so much more

as missed opportunities. My path swerves
around keeled dinghies, stroller tires, debris
of a bounteous season, when we made waves
and waves worked toward the tideline
and the tideline aspired to its high water mark.
Over the peaks and valleys — see it?
Someone’s left the stovelight on.

Dear Poet, thank you for leaving lights on and guiding us.

And so for day 1885
10.02.2012

Different lighting. Different forms of evanescence.

from “Moonlight”

Thus are moths
the cloth of dreams

from “Another Dawn”

Falling maple keys
so many doors to the windy mansion
and no one home

Roo Borson Cardinal in the Eastern White Cedar

And so for day 1883
08.02.2012