Tag: music

‘Such Human-Scale Signatures’

SoutherlyBlog

Kate Fagan Here is one “photograph in the brain” from Berkeley. I’m sitting with Pete at the foot of a towering sequoia. The tree is beside a small canal. Students zigzag over a bridge. Every backpack is a house. A man on a bicycle looks like Kit Robinson. The sequoia is a column of quiet, stretching from a subsonic hum in the ground. Actually the tree makes the quiet. I’m saturated in the vertigo of memories arriving before they are made. A crow on the bridge. It’s good, the imperfect drift, the narrative, the backpacks. Leaning on acres of bark…

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‘Written to Music’

SoutherlyBlog

Kate Fagan Leave the long fall between us (peak after peak) Here were my paints and there were my powders And then I was drunk and we lost each other My shadow tumbled after Soaking cinnamon leaves in the lake of the moon The roll of the damned drum calls me to duty The dice in the light of the lamp I hear a stone gong I lean full weight on my slender staff Yellow leaves shaken and petals confused to my garden The hard road is written to music – Cedar Sigo, from ‘Panels for the Walls’ in Language     …

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‘Into the Interior’

SoutherlyBlog

Kate Fagan Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon. – Denise Levertov, from ‘Into the Interior’ in O Taste and See[i] It takes a long time to write precise things. Mountain, mountain, mountain. This is the only way Levertov can describe what her speaker is thinking and feeling in the poem ‘Into the Interior’. Which interior? And is the observer a guest or stranger there? Each mountain is a marker of time and place. But ‘mountain’ is also an average, a changeable outline imposed on a living system. For a second Levertov’s poem…

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The Sound Of Music

SoutherlyBlog

by Samuel Wagan Watson My next collection of poetry should now be a semi-completed manuscript in the custody of my publisher. It should be, it would be, it could be…shoulda, woulda, coulda…Truth be told, I rounded a jagged edge a couple of weeks ago in the writing and now I’m stuck on a splinter-curve in the pages. Getting around this particular corner is dangerous. I’m not writing enough to progress and I run the risk of writing too much in the wrong direction and could easily jack-knife my journey all together. I am notorious for allowing a manuscript to cook…

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