In the traboules of the Croix-Rousse
the shuffling silk weaver
the bile of vertigo rising in his throat moves left
in the stairwell only the balls of his feet
on narrow circular steps
(from Lyon, Pierre L’Abbé)
Pierre L’Abbé is a poet and fiction writer, he recently translated Palestine, a novel by Hubert Haddad.
I am working on a new GIF to accompany 5 lines from Lyon by Pierre L’Abbe. The stanza he sent me is so evocative I keep creating new images. So a few more days until I post that.
In the meantime, in a file folder, I found a poem & drawing from July 10, 2013. Close to eight years ago. My dryer was broken, though not the washing machine, so I went to the laundromat with bags of wet clothing. I brought a pen and paper.
The memory of writing a poem in the laundromat impacts me more than re-reading the poem. The poem touches on loss. It was a big deal at the time. As big as the universe. The drawing seems to be about the future. And loss as well.
He examines something, a memory, maybe it belonged to somebody, while his body transforms. He’s growing wings made of fossils or maybe a spiked spinal column has departed. Disappearing. His tears fall channeled into ancient patterns. Or maybe those channels teach him new patterns. Giving him fuel. Leaves, or flames, grow from his eyes. A drawing about vision.
A quickly sketched ink drawing might express many secrets. Something unknown always at work.
Although the title in the GIF looks like a book and the GIF looks like a book trailer it’s not. However I created poetic text after the fact.
*
The Light Brigade
As in
Let There Be Light.
Witness
The mechanics of charging light.
Witness traction activate
Clouds of unknowing known
As muscled determination.
The mechanical opposite to A sucker born every minute.
Touch your tongue to the tent of your mouth. Announce
Charge
Pronounce light
As in
Let There Be Light.
*
Notes on the GIF: Intimations of Runic script transform into curvilinear vegetal design indicating a charging beast. It happened visually by itself (so to speak) during the design process.
Finding ‘his’ footing. Gaining traction. The irony of a ‘massive’ beast doing double-duty as charging light. Charging like flashlight beams in a force field? Surely he is not disembodied.
This GIF ponders our pressing situation, universal as it is, and the question of something, anything, out of the blue in reply.
*
I have been slowly working my way through Marina Tsvetaeva’s ‘Art in the Light of Conscience – Eight Essays on Poetry’ and read yesterday about Zhukovsky’s translation of Goethe’s Erlking. There is a child, on a horse, held in his father’s arms… All new to me. I borrowed the image and added that bit about ‘the only city’ and related the child’s emotions to String Theory. To not do justice to Tsvetaeva’s essay titled Two Forest Kings I’ll just call it mesmerizing.
A poetry video from eight years ago I made with a professional camera operator and video/audio editor, location sound mixer, a drummer, public domain silent film (masters!) footage, Spanish & French translation, urban footage…
I am Goya
of the bare field, by the enemy’s beak gouged
till the craters of my eyes gape
I am grief
I am the tongue
of war, the embers of cities
on the snows of the year 1941
I am hunger
I am the gullet
of a woman hanged whose body like a bell
tolled over a blank square
I am Goya
O grapes of wrath!
I have hurled westward
the ashes of the uninvited guest!
and hammered stars into the unforgetting sky – like nails
I am Goya
Translated by Stanley Kunitz in Antiworlds
Vosnesensky recites I am Goya in Russian accompanied by an image of Goya:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcGwdfsTDas&feature=emb_rel_end
I received a book on the Spanish artist Goya – the biography by Robert Hughes – for Christmas. It’s in the queue. I’m finishing a book on Picasso set in Paris in the early 1900s. He’s working on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and in competition with Matisse. The author, Miles J. Unger, puts a fair amount of detail into Picasso’s Spanish youth and trips home.
During the first lockdown I watched many (contemporary) Russian TV (episodic) programs about WW2. Some incorporated archival footage. Vosnesensky, born in Moscow, was 8 or 9 during the Nazi invasion, encirclement, and Battle of Moscow.
To create angels
Is to slice pie and name wedges:
difficult angles of light preserved in heart’s jelly
teenaged crushes trapped diagonally
undirected love felt in the presence of music
infatuation without object
movement in the skull
turtles waking in the mind’s mud
grape cluster the past becomes if artfully remembered
not images
but the script under them
negative space written in spelling errors
negligence that amends the soul
a family of perspectives driving a cumulative death
into the oncoming traffic
whole note in a black triangle on a blue background
disappearances denting the air
weather not noticed by the self absorbed
ignited visions
kissed ashes
barrel in the cellar
parallel fermentation of grape juice and darkness
the strong red taste of every humanizing event
stolen hour at the church dance
when a hard father’s daughter meets the one
who steals her from home
mines and quarries dug with the eyes
dream’s mailman
slipping letters through the slot
the white surrounding this
word
Luciano Iacobelli is a Toronto poet, publisher and editor. From 2007 to 2019 he was involved with Quattro books as both publisher and editor. He still runs a micropress entitled Lyricalmyrical press, specializing in hand made poetry chapbooks. As an author, he has published 6 full length books of poetry, his most recent book DOLOR MIDNIGHT was published in 2018 and deals with the subject of gambling. His next book, NOCTOGRAMS is due to be published in the fall of 2020 and deals with the subject of night and transformation.
Prologue begins THE ANGEL NOTEBOOK (Seraphim Editions, 2007)
When the situation hits reverse
When you sleep and the situation speaks in tongues
When you don’t have a seatbelt and you don’t have a car
Going backwards off a cliff is not such a bad plan.
You might start dancing and you might change hats
You might introduce yourself as somebody new
But you don’t have a car and you don’t want to steal
So you rise from the dead just to try it out.
And you’re not such a dunce – as you feel your way –
And you spin even more – and feel even more new.
I wrote this in a couple of minutes to the tune of Fates Right Hand by Rodney Crowell – sort of a country rap song from years ago. I always like personal transformation stories. Not that Fate’s Right Hand is a personal transformation story. But I guess the juxtaposition of these images signifies such a possibility.
