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.
Nomad life
Marcus Slease’s new book Play Yr Kardz Right (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2017) collects poems written in the last several years, almost all of them featuring an unusual technique: pronunciation spelling. The particular variety he employs is called “eye dialect,” because it is meant to appeal to the eye rather than the ear. You can’t detect it from simply listening to the poems, for example at Slease’s book launch reading in Madrid last September.