Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
John Clare's vowelless letter (performed)
Plus Partch, Reznikoff, Mother Goose, Khlebnikov, & Joe Hill
My reading of Clare's vowelless letter at the launch for Barbaric Vast & Wild: Poems for the Millennium Vol. V, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and John Bloomberg-Rissman, at The Poetry Project, Oct. 14, 2015.