White Out

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Another Jenny Kanzler Two-fer

 Into the Kanzler maelstrom again on P.F.S. Post, in stereo.  

Deep Wood's Woven Shade: Apparition Poem #1347

Because women who paint have two bodies,
the fragile blood/flesh vessel common, normed,
to all, & an aggregate of coalesced colors & forms,
extending residue useful to raise brains past models,
the winter day arose I plumbed the depths (for a random
reason) of my files, found a miracle, ten paintings,
all master class, by her, without understanding how
I’d mislaid them a decade before. But there, in that now,
I found her body again, the first stroked into
the second, & it was a revelation past anything but

the most violently revelatory intercourse possible
between two human beings. Honestly, not hostile
but real, our more literal expression had wobbled
on skittish rails towards the noncommittal or gossamer.
But as she left it for real, her physical body, in coalesced
colors & forms, the retrieval was all intercourse elevated
into matrimony usually thought too good for the human
race. It is, actually. Especially given the work’s twists
& turns towards revealing again all this dullness
we live in. Four bodies must suffice, to turn dullness to fullness.

Apparition Poem #1180 in Scud

 Apparition Poem #1180 in Scud. 

Genius Loci (Slight Return)

The term genius loci is one I heard first used by Steve Halle twenty years ago in Henniker. I found it intriguing. What it designates- the guiding spirit or principle of places (rather than people or things)- is something that has animated a big chunk of my life, from Logan Square to Chicago to Plymouth Meeting. There is then, of course, West Philadelphia, and the poem Genius Loci from the Aughts Philly section of Something Solid has been rewritten as it now stands on P.F.S. Post. Jenny Kanzler now stands in the foreground, where she has always more or less belonged. Have I been, previously, coy? Slightly. Aughts Philly could make anyone coy. Babes. 

Mojo Thing #2: William Butler Yeats

 

The title Deep Wood’s Woven Shade is lifted from the brief, early lyric poem Who Goes with Fergus? by William Butler Yeats. There’s a sense of parallelism between Mondrian and Yeats in relation to this collection— as with Mondrian, there is a limpid clarity to Yeats’ early lyric poems which could be said to work as an antidote to the convoluted semi-obscurity of this group of Apparition Poems. With Yeats, raw sonority also becomes an issue— the sense of pronounced pleasure, in Yeats’ early lyrics, in the incantatory magic of strongly employed, strongly supported lyricism. Refrains and repetitions, in early Yeats, take and transcendentalize that the poems are meant to induce pleasure— in language, imagery, and the symbolistic system around natural surroundings (Glen-Car, Innisfree) which animate the early Yeats’ group. This, before a sense of social responsibility led Yeats to adopt a relatively more representative bardic posture, and thus attempt his own bid at being what I have called “consummate.”

Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Dresser in Lothlorien Poetry Journal

 Dresser,  from Aughts Philly, Something Solid, in Lothlorien Poetry Journal.