·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

Charles Amarkahnian - former KPFA music director and Director of the Other Minds Music Festival, etc. - and an old friend called today to say Other Minds had digitized & archived a piece of mine from Ode to Gravity, Charles’ well, known once long running radio show. It is a 1973 music/poetry improv piece I performed live with then poet & musician, Suzie Garrett, and Jeff Booker, musician in the KPFA studios. If you want, you can go direct to the archive:

http://www.archive.org/audio/audio-details-db.php?collectionid=SteveVincentSusieGarrett&collection=other_minds

Suzie and I read and improvise back and forth off our own works - musically and word wise - letting alternative lines of each other variously resonate with totally spontanous effects, implications, etc. (Well, sometimes she and I read our own poems without the back and forth). The music - thumb harps, flute, sheet metal sounds - is still very infectious. (It does take the tape awhile to get Suzie’s voice miked right - but then it gets good).

A kick to listen to (not all, occasionally a little embarrassing!) but wow, a flashback of 31 years - different energy, voice et all. I got excited by parts of it. Thinking why did I not pursue this medium further!! About as free from the page as I could get.

Do check out the rest of the Other Minds site - all kinds of good shows, Steve Reich, Carl Rakowski, etc., etc. Charles was/is definitely on the sound edge.

As various as possible
Tight lipped, tenderly I approach

Without tears, Sappho,
How wonderful things emerge
Step by step, I promise to love you:

She goes quiet, blushes
Comes to my side
Forgets nothing. I tell her I adore her:

Certainly, she says
I am your memory
What is old and ugly between us

As if surrounded by weeds
The stickiest burrs
Will be torn out, taken out to the dump:

I will take the heavy, dark copper chain from your neck
I will graze your white throat until the tips of my fingers
Shutter.

Must say this Presidential election is beginning to feel like a National
pinched nerve. When will it go away? Last night, in the middle of that five
hour, 14 inning marathon play-off game between the Yanks and the Red Sox, I
could not help but have the suspicion that the Kerry-Bush tug-a-war was
being played out before our very eyes. It’s obviously not over - the Series
nor the election - but it’s great to have the tension played out on the
diamond and the television instead of, say, one’s neck.

Will it happen again tonight, or will it be one or the other in a landslide?
Tie it up Red Sox! I want this to keep going as long as possible. Whoever
wins, the World Series will be the North versus some version of the South (Southwest) (St. Louis or Houston) which will - if nothing else - simplify the political implications.

If it is the Sox versus the Astros, think of it as: Boston versus Houston (as in Kerry vs. Bush.)

Yesterday the sheer delight (well, real anguish,too) of reading - for the first time - Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor. In preparation for the Benjamin Britten Opera of same name - this afternoon.
Finances have put us way up in the $40 seats, the top row of the last balcony.
“The best sound in the whole place” - the ticket office person kindly tells me.

In poetry, I often think, that condition is also often true - it’s standing out on the far margins that so much comes home to roost - the messages in the detritus stuck across the sewer grate. The twelve empty cans of Budweise beer cans left on an isolated beach - where I had wandered off to sleep - on the Greek Island of Tinos. That was in 1972 during the Junta dictorship. At the time Budweiser had no commercial distribution in Greece. The cans were my first real material clue of the collaborative relationship between the Generals and the U.S. Navy patrolling in the Mediterranian - the cans, like a day lunch, taken by Navy sailors off a local, visiting, ship. The cans also an augur of US corporate presence and Americanization of Greece. The sight definitely then put a dent in my nineteen year old romantic notion of being present on those Islands. Ancient history and myth suspended under the violation of the contemporary.

Billy Budd, in part, about the early 18th Century presence of the British Navy in the same sea and up to the same stuff.

Oh well, certain circles keep circling to provoke similar stuff.

So off to see(sea) the Lamb (Billy) take the rope.

***

I am back! It was terribly moving and good. It’s interesting how today the story and Opera expands its interpretive scope. Imperialism, military law and hierarchy versus human rights in war time, and now the added layer of
homophobic terror, envy and vengeful repulsion in the face of seductive beauty.
Definitely packed its punch.
I won’t, but one could go on about Melville’s original story versus the liberties of the libretto, and to what degree the invented language worked and/or violated the story..

Hop hip he blind tree
Neo he tree he blind
Tree neo he so see
He blind mouth (birdsong loss)
He eye he blind tree
Neo he tree he blind
Tree neo hay blind eye
Tree neo he breathe he
Blind tree neo he blind
Yes fi tree yes fa –.
Alien silence not cold against
Post one into throat over
Subtle game jammer, shrubbed, foothill
Into bitter root he will stumble
Behind here, tubas and bass
Force him to stumble (timeless
Zone divorces a wife, knee
Now forgot) velum he knows
Graveled plans, washed sandstone wedged
Son: nor blind, cold moon
Move forward fast blue dragonfly
Nor hot with hate the
Largesse opened ground rhythm oneself
Wall of fresh black sky
Or woman shortened weed burial
Lessens the pillar of gossip
Morning resolve a solid conviction
A young man born early
The father’s laughter much older
Fa, Doe, stiff, ancient goats
Melt aster’s hellish loosing light
Sealed: sorrow…fin…unfolded…sails
Shrunk white body, small cockpit
Sat still to enrich wisdom,
Ocean’s desert: multi-gendered demons
Paper plate columns, jittered sky
Porch ice-cream sticks layered
Bottom drawer one fits or
The bull to slaughter, ammonia
Urine, shit prat-double-fall
Into more shit, imprisoned blue
Vines against us, attracted arcs
Dumb man, two-thirds devil
An old man fears circumcision
The multitude acquiesce in silence
The weak amongst the weakest
Father thoughtless on the water
An absence against us while
The sun rises against genuflection
Brother on brother against need
Father without one glittered dream
He without a marriage, mouth banded,
“Weak, your enemy still blind.”
“His loss yet once more.”
Weakest, damaged, his sweetheart stays
Enthusiasm blooms everyone without strings
Weakest without friends – his loss –
Acres in which silence speaks
Against the weaker falling broken
The weakest break him: our
Hatred resealed. Weakest against weaker:
“One’s head lifts no one
or 1/3rd devil lives full:
In happiness heaven completes one
Ignores oneself, body thin, lake
Trickles, sits one’s channel flooded
Much less than the cosmopolitan:
Loved I resist the City –
Aver, will not tolerate it.
No risk to find my father
No daring will find him.

(See entry for September 30 for first part of this on-going work)

Either as saucers sit level
Fixed obedience opposite staccato blip
Heal private full once less
Over filtered ice stirred round:
The sky blocks her escape

The ocean a no go
Heat reverses the street chill
Roots stumble an hour into
Gray thin moon a drought
Shrubs gone silver, women full

Lines in parallel quiet, thin
Plots sprinkled over, weeds don’t
Center-cylindrical crown runs vertical:
Whorls, thorns, borders, slack rain
Chin up, slow, short trunk

Sealed currency – sky flattened, gone
Into crooked trunk one spits
Random salted palm soft lick
Vanilla warm – waters turbulent x
Marshland truncates one’s smooth sweat

Slow spurts lower quarter who
Emerged anonymous first heated veil
Inferno whiplash moon once, an eye,
Penumbra, dirty dark, split diamond
Before noon blasted, thoughtless moon

Aerial, resisted sky over sky
Generous swordfish tailfin open
Shallow state solution door knock
Tongue & groove peg-less floor
Flipped up boards, vertical, warped:

Headbands – a dozen weeds, spiked,
Multiple vellum instructed curled hairs
No objective – armless torso twisted –
The sky – a diminished broomstick
Illogical responses eliminate what known

Fullness: the infinite stop, large
Blasts, shortened quadrants, aimless duty,
Fullness – no end, nothing concrete –
Wonderfully winsome disgrace, an egg
Cracked bestows one’s gift, initial

Death (deep purple plum leaf
In flight flapped wind strewn
Crashed) suffer damnation at 27
Pharmaceutical intake the nasty leveler
Dream an empty sidewalk, walk,

Note sky, eliminate worn history
To offer empty blown palms
Previous without known sound embrace
Beyond chronology into her lost
In immediate time serve two.

(to be coninued)

October breezes the intellect: