First Post. I am excited about reading my poems at the Coburg Poetry Workshop, with Allan Briesmaster, on Thursday, September 21. The theme of the selections I have chosen to read is “playfulness.” Poems about love, spirituality, poetry and music reveal how refreshment comes into our lives through play.
The Future Will Be Here Soon
In my future is a new book of poetry I’m calling The Heart of All Music: poems about musicians and their music. The poems are based on impressions I gathered from 500 live concerts I attended in the past few years. Live music excites my imagination. My imagination instinctively forms language that expresses how music stimulates me. That, and a lot of work, made these poems. Allan Briesmaster is editing my work, and Aeolus House will be publishing the volume in the Spring of ’18. Here are a few bytes.
On a Performance by Daniel Bolshoy
The Spanish guitar speaks privately in tones
rich as rosewood, sharp as cracking bones
that fall as feathers filling an entire hall
On a Performance by Valery Gergiev
Valery “The Great” flows ‘cross the stage
fluid as cat and—“BAM”–
the orchestra bursts into sound.
Valery “The Great” –yes– Gergiev
conducts with a toothpick baton,
his left hand cupped and quivering—
poles of a battery that joins Gergiev’s life
to each cell of his Kirov Orchestra
that fire like nerves in his brain.
Air-Conditioned Stanza
I was sitting in a cafeteria listening to the chatter and clatter of an incoming crowd, and the air-conditioning in the ducts began to boom, and that put me in mind of my paternal grandfather, Yeshaiya Fefferman, who was a tinsmith and worked alone in his dark shop bending, crimping and hammering sheets of galvanized iron into massive sections of ductwork, and this stanza came to me:
Huge hammer of air conditioner’s muffled thud
grandfather hammering in the dark and dirty workshop
large taciturn man, heavy shoes, heavy tread, slow, lonely work
grim and satisfied response of a large creature burrowing in the earth.