jan zwicky: practising bach (gavotte)

Gavotte


E major: June wind
in the buttercups, wild
and bright and tough.
Like luck -- a truth
that's on the surface of a thing,
not because it's shallow, but because
it's open: overtoned.
Because it rings.
                           Fate, too,
it's character. But it's
the shape -- the cadence
and the counterpoint. Luck
lives in the moment, and it
looks at you: the clear eye,
gold, when being sings.


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

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

jan zwicky: practising bach (loure)

Loure


Why is Bach's music more like speech than any other? Because of its wisdom, I think. Which means its tempering of lyric passion by domesticity, its grounding of the flash of lyric insight in domestic earth, the turf of dailyness.


    Let us think of music as a geometry of the emotions. Bach's practice, then, resembles that of the egyptians: Earth's measure as a way of charting the bottomlands of the Nile, the floodwaters of the heart, as a way of charting life. Opera, Greek tragedy, Romantic poetry tell us that sex and death are what we have to focus on if we want to understand any of the rest. Bach's music, by contrast, speaks directly to, and of, life itself -- the resonant ground of sex and death.


   And it does this not without ornamentation, but without fuss: the golden ratio in the whelk shell lying on the beach, the leaf whorl opening to sun, the presence of the divine in the chipped dish drying in the rack, that miracle: good days, bad days, a sick kid, a shaft of sunlight on the organ bench. Talk to me, I'm listening.


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

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

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.


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

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

bp nichol: two words: a wedding

(for rob & sharon)


There are things you have words for, things you do not have words for. There are words that encompass all your feelings & words that encompass none. There are feelings you have that are like things to you, picked up & placed in the pocket, worn like the cloth the pocket is attached to, like a skin you live inside of. There is a body of feeling, of language, of friends; the body politic, the body we are carried inside of till birth, the body we carry our self inside of till death, a body of knowledge that tells of an afterlife, a heaven, an unknown everything we have many words for but cannot encompass. There are relationships between words & concepts, between things, between life & death, between friends & family, between each other & some other other. We wed words to things, people to feelings, speak of a true wedding of the mind & heart, intuition & intellect, & out of this form our realities. Our realities are wedded one to another, concepts & people are joined, new people conceived within that mesh of flesh & realities, are carried forward in the body of the mother, the family, the bodily love we have for one another. They are creating their own reality every step of the way, daily, another kind of reality is born, each new word, person, expanding our vocabulary, our concepts, new realities are conceived, our old reality changes, the 'real' grows realer every day. We are marrying the flesh to the flesh, the word to the daily flux of lives we know & don't know, our friends grow older and marry, raise children as you once were children with mothers & fathers of your own, grow older, so many things you still lack words for, struggle to wed the inner & outer worlds, the self to some other self or selves, confess your love & struggle with one another, together, conscious there is this word is you, your name, & that you are yet another thing or things you will never encompass, never exhaust the possibilities of, because you are wedded to the flux of life, because we are words and our meanings change.

Nichol, bp. "Two Words: A Wedding" The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1982.

john terpstra: a prayer to be in paradise with the children

for a baptism

When I must come to you, o my God, I pray

it be in the early hours of that day,

and just as on these mornings I would rather sleep

I beg the lively company to keep

of kids, in Paradise, where rest and rising meet.

My eyes will open, I will yawn and stretch,

and to the children jumping on the bed

I shall say, "I am Johannes Terpstra,

and this is Paradise, at your pleasure.”

And I shall say to them, "This house has many rooms,

its hallways are for running, take the stairs in twos,

and we'll play inside the mansions of our living God,

for all doors open to the treasures of his kinderlove.”

Let me awaken with these children, Lord, in your home,

this offspring of your fondest word, who roam

the towered heart of day and lift it from the frame

our plans project; and let me be like them, the same.

I shall arise and follow the one who follows his nose,

followed by the sniffling sound of those who have a cold,

by the ones who dawdle and the ones who'd sooner shove,

by those who pile blocks in silence and those who love

to knock all such building down, by the bossy ones

and those who daily bear their brethren, by the talkers,

by the ones who, left alone, begin to eat the garden dirt

because they, o Lord, desire to taste of your creation

which is good.

                       Let it be with these kids that I awake,

perfectly restored, inside the house your design has made

for the halt, the lame, for those whose raw deformity

stands out: the unloved, or over adored.

                                                         And let it be

that angels guide our thousand feet upon the stair

to lead us into hidden access of the secret lair

of your delights: the preparations, boxes, reels,

the paper, crayons, the fountains of water, ferris wheels.

Pamper us there, for whom the faith is one, waking up

on this morning or that. O Lord God, fill the cup

When I must come to you, I pray

it be at any time of any day,

and if my eyes were closed, I shall awake

now, to Paradise, having seen your grace

fall somewhat like rain upon this one child's face.

Terpstra, John. “A Prayer to be in Paradise with the Children”.