BERNEVAL

Lucia Perillo
On the Spectrum of Possible Deaths
“The Unturning”

My friend said: write about the dog in The Odyssey —
four hundred pages in, I found him […]
[…]
[…] you expect the dog to give him away
with a lick or a yip, but this is not what happens.
Instead we are told that “death closed down his eyes,”
[…]
[…] But I wonder
if, for the sake of the shape of the plot
the author ought to have let him remain
for another line or two, if only to thump again his tail.

The whole poem is worth reading beyond these bare bones.

And so for day 2821
02.09.2014

Arielle Twist
Disintegrate / Dissociate

A single line from “The Girls”

a game, an experiment, an experience, alive, afraid

Reads like a narrative syntagm (an invitation to consider how a game becomes a fearful situation); or a reverse transcription for harnessing fear to aestheticized ends in game play. Or neither. A set of hyperlinks. Readable in any order. A set of themes for variations.

And so for day 2820
01.09.2014

If this was the sole surviving sentence, it would be worthy.

Our libraries are poorer for having only scraps of Sappho’s body of work, but our imaginations aren’t.

Jason Guriel
“Lovable Losers”
The Pig-headed Soul

And so for day 2819
31.08.2014

Gwen Benaway
Day/break

The last poem ends : “yes, I admit I lied / this body / knows nothing / I can call / home.”

The postscript ends : “and I turn back, / reluctant and confused, / to life.”

Cast out of home the persona is positioned as turning to life. The trail runs through some of the most figurative language of the collection, in a passage about abandonment (note the tension between voiced passivity set in counterpoint to wish being voiced – a very poetic act of volition) …. “I only wanted to chase / the end of day / to the hem of night / and sit there / among the new stars / in a body of spun grass / until language / abandons me / and I turn back / reluctant and confused / to life”

That mention of “hem of night” evokes a memory or an echo of an often quoted image …

It is evening; the day is gone, fast gather and deepen the shades of twilight! In the words of a German allegory, “The babbling day has touched the hem of night’s garment, and, weary and still, drops asleep in her bosom.”

Longfellow.

But sleep evades the speaker — the chase is done; language will not abandon her. However reluctant she may be she hovers between words and body.

And so for day 2816
28.08.2014

Soraya Peerbaye
Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names

From the suite of poems that give the collection its title: botany meets linguistics.

In a museum farther north is the only recording of the Yaghan tongue. Ferns of language pressed into the soft wax cylinders of an Edison phonograph, recored a century ago. Their grammar integrated perspective. Your name would be different if I called to you from a canoe, or from the shore; your name would be different if earth or water lay between us.

And what lays between us and the poem: words on the page or words in the air. Reminding us that our names are not ourselves.

And so for day 2813
25.08.2014

Soraya Peerbaye
Poems for the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names

“Armonica”

My first reading was arrested by the term “carinal” as the poet describes how “he tucks the instrument”

in his palm           it disappears like a blade of grass

hands, carinal           fingers, fluttering wings

Carinal = adjective for a a keel-shaped structure, mainly in biology, and in case you were wondering how this connects with flight: carina is “the ridge of a bird’s breastbone, to which the main flight muscles are attached.” So much pivots on the one word. And the poet’s careful observation.

And so for day 2812
24.08.2014