jan zwicky: practising bach (prelude)

over the course of this week i will be posting practising bach, a suite of poems by jan zwicky, meant to be read aloud before the various respective segments of bach's partita no. 3 in E major for solo violin, BMV1006. i will post a link to the appropriate section of the piece, as well as the corresponding poetry. take your time.

Prelude

There is, said Pythagoras, a sound

the planet makes: a kind of music

just outside our hearing, the proportion

and the resonance of things -- not

the clang of theory or the wuthering

of human speech, not even

the bright song of sex or hunger, but

the unrung ringing that

supports them all.

The wife, no warning, dead

when you come home. Ducats

in the fishheads that you salvage

from the rubbage heap. Is the cosmos

laughing at us? No. It's saying

improvise. Everywhere you look

there's beauty, and it's rimed 

with death. If you find injustice

you'll find humans, and this means

that if you listen, you'll find love.

The substance of the world is light,

is water: here, clear

even when it's dying; even when the dying

seems unbearable, it runs.


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and now, click on this link to hear the preludio.

Zwicky, Jan. "Practising Bach" The Best Canadian Poetry in English. Markham: Tightrope Books, 2009.