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Short Takes: Walking, Mid-April
I am wide/awake. The mind/is listening.” —William Carlos Williams The photographs were taken mid-April on walks in Riverside Park and Central Park. Listening List Steve Reich’s The Desert Music On...
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Short Takes: Mid-May, with Hector Berlioz
On my most recent visit to New York City, I was foiled in my first attempt to see how spring was coming on in the Central Park Conservatory Garden. The scent of lilacs mixed with privilege wafted...
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Muusika
It must be somewhere, the original harmony . . . —Juhan Liiv When we first decided on a trip to Helsinki, we didn’t know that Tallinn, Estonia, was so nearby. Nor did we know, when we first arranged...
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Scenes from the King’s Road: Virolahti and Hamina
I will show you a way that I have travelled. —Eeva-Liisa Manner In the middle ages, the King’s Road, now primarily a tourist attraction, was “Finland’s most important route.” [Baedeker’s Finland Guide...
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More Scenes from the King’s Road: Kotka to Porvoo
The more I learn, the less I know. Finland’s story, as for any country, is varied and complex, and my understandings are necessarily incomplete. I stand at the fence and peer through its slats,...
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Living the Non-Narrative Life with Nielsen, Ashbery, and Ives
Where was I? —John Ashbery (from The Skaters) If you didn’t know what was going to happen next would you live your life any differently? —Charles Bernstein (from The Meandering Yangtze) At the New York...
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Now The Leaves Are Falling Fast
Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse’s flowers will not last; Nurses to the graves are gone, And the prams go rolling on. —W. H. Auden, from Autumn Song Now autumn is well past its peak, the ground...
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A Cubist Glimpse
I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don’t believe it. —Frank O’Hara The poet Pierre Reverdy is reputed to have said, “From 1910 to 1914 I learned the cubist lesson.” I’ve yet to find out what...
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The Picture of Pasternak in a Prospect of Flowers
Boris Pasternak, whom no one yet knew . . . had this to say about poetry: “It will always be in the grass, it will always be necessary to bend over to see it, it will always be too simple to be...
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The Song of the Earth
The earth breathes deeply, filled with peace and sleep. —from Das Abschied (The Farewell), Das Lied von der Erde I’ve long had a CD of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth). I...
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On Creatively Misreading Peter Cole’s The Invention of Influence
. . . thinking we know where we’re going and then getting somewhere, despite our intention. —Peter Cole, from Actual Angels I was tempted into reading poet Peter Cole’s book, The Invention of...
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Seeking Shostakovich . . . in the Verses of Michelangelo
Some kind of spring has broken in my brain. I have not written a note since the Fifteenth Symphony. That is a terrible state of affairs for me. —Dmitri Shostakovich, Letter to Isaak Glikman, January...
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Forms of Resurrection: Wendell Berry’s Poems and the Music of Shawn Jaeger
Again we come to the resurrection of bloodroot from the dark —Wendell Berry Sometimes a particular piece of music takes hold and thoroughly captures my imagination. Shawn Jaeger’s The Cold Pane is one...
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Sun-Dogs: James MacMillan’s Setting of a Michael Symmons Roberts Poem
Dazzle mine eyes, or do I see three suns? —Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 3, Act 2, Scene 1 I’m not terribly versed in choral music, to say the least, but little by little I’ve been adding pieces to my...
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Kyle Gann’s Transcendental Sonnets
and what if they eat clouds, and drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of man —Ralph Waldo Emerson Kyle Gann’s Transcendental Sonnets are settings of sonnets by the...
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Breezeway Homage No. 1, “not everyone sees it” (The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend)
The collage is a visual review and homage to John Ashbery’s poem “The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend” in his new collection, Breezeway. For a far more cogent response to Breezeway, read Mark Kerstetter’s...
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Breezeway Homage No. 2, A Fountain in the Street
The collage takes its name from the poem “A Fountain in the Street” in John Ashbery’s newest collection Breezeway. Ashbery prefaced the poem with an epigraph from the poet Larry Fagin. I’ve been unable...
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Protected: Breezeway Homage No. 3, “All benefited in some way.”
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
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Breezeway Homage No. 4, Strange Reaction
The collage takes its name from the poem “Strange Reaction” in John Ashbery’s collection Breezeway. Its last line, which refers to croutons, may be one of the strangest closing lines in the book. Yet...
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Breezeway Homage No. 5, “the inauspicious leavings of a day”
The collage pays homage to John Ashbery’s poem “Gravy for the Prisoners” in the volume Breezeway. The poem’s gentle, often elegiac, rumination on the process of living puts in mind these lines from The...
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