a curatorial content blog of modern and contemporary poetry, poetics, photography, philosophy, permaculture, and the arts

It’s  Sunday Morning; also the title of a poem by Wallace Stevens, in which he wrote ~

Is there no change of death in paradise? /  Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs /
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, / Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth, /
With rivers like our own that seek for seas / They never find, . . . 

By seeing and reading about the art works of Andy Goldsworthy, called by him, earth works, I discovered time as rhythm*, the first image – the shadow – a gondola made of wasp paper carrying words through water to make a first poem’s soundings; the Chauvet cave’s Megaloceros Gallery for human kind’s first paintings, of animals they hunted, ate, worshipped for their life-giving powers, and loved beyond death – the shamanistic, enlivening power of art, as felt in the poems of Clayton Eshleman’s Juniper Fuse, through Timothy Treadwell’s shaman eyeballs as depicted in the lens of filmmaker Werner Herzog, in Grizzly Man. To love life is to love death, inseparable as they are. Who is to know any one individual’s interrelationships with bread and wine, one’s own intestinal pathways, fingernails bitten to bits by bitumen nightmares, better than the Other(s), within?

To come into another artist’s or poet’s work, is to be changed by it, transported, confounded, brought back to life by it. I am currently reading Anne-Adele Wight’s new poetry collection, Sidestep Catapult, wherein I’ve devised a delightful game of hide and seek with a stranger, through neuronic rootfields of color within and without, pausing at the sound of Roethke’s ordnungs, bypassing Woodlawn Cemetery on the way to the mall, finding there those lost on pilgrimage toward the newest wrappings of  that stink bug love. When I am out of breath, her poems wait for me. Despite worst fluorescent-lit possibilities, greed gambled oil platforms, aberrations of feeling, I discover these are within pages, pages and pages of new imagination, native intelligence, richter scale language, of someone behind the night singing yes and singing no. Yet singing. I would have liked to share here a stanza or a couplet or two, but these poems do not easily break apart and we, we are the chorus. ~ yours truly, df

front cover art of Sidestep Catapult