I’ve always admired Charlie Parker, the harbinger of bebop. His arpeggios were wily cascading notes and his solos defied gravity. Yet, his personal life challenged his artistry. Genius is difficult to carry. No one understands and even the artist doesn’t fully comprehend the gift and what it requires. His horn was how he kept going. It was the music that held tight to the center even as it explored the edge.
Joy Harjo on "Bird" |
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“There is a Life Here”: On Bernadette Mayer
"'A process fills its old bed,' Mayer wrote at the very end of Memory, '& then it makes a new bed: to you past structure is backwards, you forget, you remember the past backwards & forget.' Mayer experimented with the uncut account of a life—sure that if she captured a day, a month in its totality—the truth of memory and forgetting would surface."
via N+1 |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Layla Benitez-James on Two Poems by Beatriz Miralles de Imperial
"Bea has been described as 'a poet of silence, of everything unsaid which is suggested through language,' and translating these poems opened my eyes to the immense possibilities of brevity, inspiring me to begin a book-length project in small bursts. How Dark My Skin Is Left by Her Shadow taught me the strength of distillation, how intensity rises, and pressure builds when a substance is compressed." |
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