Musical Impressionism
(after Debussy, 12 Etudes For Piano) Book One 1) For Five Fingers Call up the smoke, slowly, conjure your hidden animal soul. Quick, this is an order, not a request (quit your giggling). It's serious, we can't have this silliness, there's too much at stake. Carve the smoke quickly with your tiny hands, make shadow cutouts, now. (It's not that I don't care for you, loving only your skilled fingers, your talented skin. No, but what I need now, today, are what they promise in the dark tent of this bed, where mysteries conspire and smoke rises from an invisible fire that can't warm either of us). Do it now. 2) For the Thirds Now, as the sun fights its way out of mist, an avian concerto moves me from sleep to waking. Already she has entered the day leaving a gap in the bed, sheets still kissed by her warmth. Perhaps, I think, I'll leap out of bed, catch her on the stairs and say-- Well, what I forgot to say. My body resists the impulse, the mind calculates that it will keep. This is a squall of loss, not a storm. She's not far away. 3) For the Fourths Away from this table, this pen, words carry different weights. Silence is not decoration there. Quick waterfall notes from birds are just and only that. Things aren't taught to mean beyond themselves. But right here, at this cloth covered table, the white field of a page demands thoughts that are near reality but not themselves real. That's not at all true, of course. I've heard such theories but disagree. It's not words reflecting facts, like a mirror, just a mute language, recoverable but concealed. 4) For the Sixths Concealed under clothes her form eludes words, both truth and lies. Her hair, at times a brown storm sometimes a dark helmet. Her eyes are more daunting than her shape, to words, at least. There's a place, the nape of her neck, that I never let escape my kisses, she's so tasty there. Often, never enough, I'll just drape an arm across her shoulder, aware of her quiet heart beat, her beauty, her soul, I suppose. I want her whole. 5) For the Octaves Holes punched in silence by birds and children; a patch of mist, forgotten by the sun. There's no balance to this morning. Diffused minutes, a fractured sequence of non-events. My patience tries to mend things, but is refused. 6) For Eight Fingers Refusing a smoke for now, I squat by the fire and ask for a story. Quick, with small words, like sparks flying from these logs. You start by lying, which I enjoy. I like stories tall in the woods, crackling with fire snaps. I bask yellow in the purple night. Start again. Now. Book Two 7) For the Chromatic Scale Three blackbirds smudge the sky like dotted notes. Nearby, a red car slides past a yellow house and down a blue hill, now quick, now slow, lost at last to distance and mist. The birds bank and wheel in careless formation, silent. 8) For the Ornaments Silent smoke brushes past late blossoms, the bough still damp from last night's all too rare rain. Fire is elsewhere, smoldering leftover from the last winter feast, perhaps, or imprisoned by a presence lamp in a cold church. The blossoms remain, tossed lightly by a breeze, teased and passed by confused birds, dazzled by the damp leaves. Clouds are forming, perhaps it will rain soon, but probably not. Each drop seems like the last that will ever fall. It grows dark but I leave the lamp alone, unlighted. Silence, I think is the main requirement. It allows one to reach past this melancholy drought, to cherish the damp brown earth, and to pray for rain. 9) For Repeated Notes Rain escaped again. Birds scatter like smoke in the gray light. I'd heard some storm was due, over due. Just words from an insane weatherman. That's the third day this week he's wrong. The ground's been stirred but stays thirsty. A moon dryly wanes, interred in a sterile sky. We've lamely entered dust's reign, with these damned cheerful birds. 10) For Opposite Sonorities Birds--gaps in silence--red and blue blurs in the leaves, more active than ear or eye, a distraction from her, a difference. She (ah, that sound) in her long languors, studies in blacks and browns, the gaps in her presence. I sit here, hunched over this long table, warming my hands above coffee, birds teasing my sight, turning her over in my heart, as if she were some image of woman not a woman herself. Then suddenly in the silence between two notes, like smoke, the broken icon is gone. 11) For Compound Arpeggios Gone, the mist has vanished from the small valley of this yard. Quick quiet notes, small stones under shoes next door form a gardener's minuet. I am thinking nothing at all (though I breathe her and live her I do not, always, think her) just letting the cool day rinse me, remake me, not even keeping watch. Silent. 12) For the Accords Silence, startled to waking, to music-- No, not birds, not now, at this time, this place. It's within her, as I make an ethic of our love. Wrongly, I know, face to face with myself over these words. I replace feeling with fiction, with mirrors and smoke. I cast shadow plays on the wall, then erase them before she looks, afraid they might evoke laughter, but lust, afraid of becoming a joke at this late date. Concealed somewhere by mists and evasions, there's a strongbox of words whose meanings I've forgotten. It resists me. But if it opened, if she just heard what I meant to say, now, she would be stirred and her enthusiastic hands would fall on to my hungry skin, light as a bird's note on an ear. Enough! I become small. I've learned enough to wait, to listen for a call. Mark J. Mitchell Mark J. Mitchell studied writing at UC Santa Cruz under Raymond Carver, George Hitchcock and Barbara Hull. His work has appeared in various periodicals over the last thirty five years, as well as the anthologies Good Poems, American Places, Hunger Enough, Retail Woes and Line Drives. It has also been nominated for both Pushcart Prizes and The Best of the Net. He is the author of two full-length collections, Lent 1999 (Leaf Garden Press) and Soren Kierkegaard Witnesses an Execution (Local Gems) as well as two chapbooks, Three Visitors (Negative Capability Press) and Artifacts and Relics, (Folded Word). His novel, Knight Prisoner, is available from Vagabondage Press and two more novels are forthcoming: A Book of Lost Songs (Wild Child Publishing) and The Magic War (Loose Leaves). He lives in San Francisco with his wife, the documentarian and filmmaker Joan Juster where he makes a living showing people pretty things in his city.
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Listening to Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” at the Toledo Museum of Art by Leonard Kress8/6/2016 Listening to Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” at the Toledo Museum of Art The audience across from me comprised of Frans Hals burghers and their wives, ruffled collars and coarse snoods, who tip their stern heads in rapt appreciation, as they recognize bird songs from picnics and country outings within the music. They all seem ready to flash open their black gowns to reveal gleaming trumpets cinched to their black undergarments and blow furiously in this vast hall, so all four players might cast aside their sheet music and instruments and dance—with the rest of us, of course. Though afterwards they’d have to renounce this song and replace it with silent motionless rapture. And thus, Messiaen, burghers, all of us, wrapped and enfolded into eternal blackness beyond the reach of any song. For now, though, in this peopled hall, where measured time proceeds on course, we let it maneuver through us, this music composed in a Nazi prison camp, music that today keeps the museum guards in rapt forgetfulness of their duty, to kick out coarse sound and movement, to keep the black clad musicians undisturbed, to usher from the hall those mothers whose infants’ songs won’t be bottled-up. Messiaen’s song only partially pleases the burghers, for whom music is only good when it draws huge crowds into the halls of commerce, and goods can be sold and wrapped. They emerged after the catastrophe of the Black Plague and thrived, unmolested in their lucrative course until the early 20th century. Of course collapsing when fascist marching songs and swastikas and black armbands cuffed and plundered music. For now, there’s only this rapturous Requiem, unconstrained in this or any hall. Leonard Kress Leonard Kress has published poetry and fiction in Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, Crab Orchard Review, American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, etc. His recent collections are The Orpheus Complex, Thirteens, and Braids & Other Sestinas, and Walk Like Bo Diddley (to be released this fall.) He teaches philosophy and religion at Owens College in Ohio and edits creative non-fiction for Artful Dodge. Enigma
For H.W. It is true that I have sketched for their amusement and mine, the idiosyncrasies of fourteen of my friends ... The Enigma I will not explain – its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed ... Through and over the whole set [of variations] another and larger theme ‘goes,’ but is not played ... – Edward Elgar, 1899 The letter in which he said this is lost and the fourteen friends are all dead so they can’t tell us what it meant even if they knew in the first place. There remain only the ghost-hunters tracing spectral counterpoints which weave in and out of variations, walk through walls: counterpoints like Auld Lang Syne, the Dies Irae, Farewell and Adieu to You, My Fair Spanish Ladies, and Elgar’s own Black Knight with its identical intervals: pairs of falling thirds divided by rising fourth as the chorus sings “He beholds his children die” – as if shared by all true friendships, weaving in and out of variations, is an unheard Elgarian unconscious, an enigmatic farewell and adieu, a dark saying of grief. Jonathan Taylor Jonathan Taylor's books include the novels "Melissa" (Salt, 2015) and "Entertaining Strangers" (Salt, 2012), the memoir "Take Me Home" (Granta, 2007), and the poetry collection "Musicolepsy" (Shoestring, 2013). He is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk. Gustav Mahler, Symphony 10, 1910
Once written that nine-note discord – a wound in A-flat minor cut open by high-A on trumpet – can never be un-written never be unheard never be exorcised haunting everything after it like the annunciation of a wife’s infidelity like an orchestral unconscious, the dissonant repressed liberated by a visit to Freud in Holland. It lurks round the corner of every phrase in the remainder of the Adagio is lying in wait in the Scherzos is something to trip over in Purgatorio, is unleashed again in the finale and even reminiscences of long-ago Adagiettos cannot stop it bleeding out of the score into the twentieth century beyond. Jonathan Taylor Jonathan Taylor's books include the novels "Melissa" (Salt, 2015) and "Entertaining Strangers" (Salt, 2012), the memoir "Take Me Home" (Granta, 2007), and the poetry collection "Musicolepsy" (Shoestring, 2013). He is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk. Smooth
(after Nat King Cole’s performance of “Mona Lisa,” by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston) Are you warm, are you real, Mona Lisa? Or just a cold and lonely lovely work of art? He longs to know her gorgeous mystery, desire colluding with near-piety and well-tuned wonder in his serenade to this new “Mona Lisa,” one that’s made of flesh and blood. She’s strangely beautiful, but like the painted girl, unknowable. In vain, he asks her: does she mean to lure a lover? To resist? Or to obscure heartbreak? While her enigma fascinates the singer, it’s his voice that captivates the listener, as note by honeyed note flows with smooth elegance from this man’s throat. We hope his questions never end, his song eluding cadence; we want to prolong this wistful, weightless moment, this confection of word and tone and tenuous affection, a work of art itself. And if the pain that may have motivated his refrain becomes our pleasure, we incur no debt; he sings beyond the shadow of regret, where woe and splendor can be reconciled as smoothly as the Mona Lisa smiled. Jean L. Kreiling Jean L. Kreiling’s first collection of poems, The Truth in Dissonance (Kelsay Books), was published in 2014. Her work has appeared widely in print and online journals, including American Arts Quarterly, Angle, The Evansville Review, Measure, and Mezzo Cammin, and in several anthologies. Kreiling is a past winner of the Great Lakes Commonwealth of Letters Sonnet Contest, the String Poet Prize and the Able Muse Write Prize, and she has been a finalist for the Frost Farm Prize, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, and the Richard Wilbur Poetry Award. Rondo-Burleske
After Gustav Mahler, Symphony no.9 (1909) Lost in a labyrinth of counterpoint a polyphony of dead-ends where the hedges move even the earth is no longer unironic somewhere deep within a minotaur’s in a fugue though he too is lost in a labyrinth of counterpoint a clew of tangled scales marches leading nowhere Léharian laughter in D minor and once a glimpse of sky and song birds who aren’t lost in a labyrinth of counterpoint but all exits are blocked short-lived joy poisoned overwhelmingness overwhelmed by labyrinthine counterpoint and somewhere deep within a minotaur’s roaring rampaging through hedges enraged by a redly-budding century and the obscene tumescene of spring Jonathan Taylor Jonathan Taylor's books include the novels "Melissa" (Salt, 2015) and "Entertaining Strangers" (Salt, 2012), the memoir "Take Me Home" (Granta, 2007), and the poetry collection "Musicolepsy" (Shoestring, 2013). He is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk. Iannis Xenakis, Pithoprakta for Two Trombones, Strings, Xylophone and Woodblock (1955-6) for Nouritza Matossian the spontaneous architecture of clouds efflorescences of glissandi the probabilistic polyphony of miniscule chaoses within chaoses col legno frappé col legno frotté arco bref arco normal rainbow of pizzicati Brownian molecular motion a cloudy palimpsest beneath micro-wars of insects and continent-wide armies sometimes irregularly in-step sometimes breaking step on bridges in case collective resonance causes them to collapse all is massing towards an entropic future comprehended by no god except music and a Maxwell-Boltzmann formula Jonathan Taylor Note: this poem is inspired by the description of Pithoprakta in Noritza Matossian, Xenakis (Nicosia: Moufflon, 2005). Jonathan Taylor's books include the novels "Melissa" (Salt, 2015) and "Entertaining Strangers" (Salt, 2012), the memoir "Take Me Home" (Granta, 2007), and the poetry collection "Musicolepsy" (Shoestring, 2013). He is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk." Borodin
Will never again raise his baton, But the orchestra plays Tashkent, Bukhara, Samarkand. Wind is a thread Hanging From distant mountains. Steppe grasses hiss And sand, More sand, blows. A pony waits, Feet together, Head down. Dusk drifts Like a violet scarf Across day's face, Hush, hush, Quiet, Still. Here at time's end there is Salt But no tears. Robert Walton This poem was previously published at Fictionique. Robert Walton is a musician with several dozen published poems. He says: "My novel Dawn Drums was recently awarded first place in the 2014 Arizona Authors Association’s literary contest and also won the 2014 Tony Hillerman Best Fiction Award. Barry Malzburg and I wrote “The Man Who Murdered Mozart”, published by Fantasy & SF in 2011." Dr. Ernest Williamson III has published creative work in over 600 journals. Professor Williamson has published poetry in over 185 journals, including The Oklahoma Review, Review Americana: A Creative Writing Journal, Pamplemousse, formerly known as The Gihon River Review, and The Copperfield Review. Some of his visual artwork has appeared in journals such as The Columbia Review, The GW Review, New England Review; and The Tulane Review. Dr. Williamson has published articles on comparative education in the academic journal Academic Exchange Extra (University of Northern Colorado),and his research has been cited in journals such as The Urban Review and The Public Purpose(American University). Many of his creative works have been published in journals representing over 75 colleges and universities around the world. Dr. Williamson is an Assistant Professor of English at Allen University. His poetry has been nominated three times for the Best of the Net Anthology. Williamson holds a B.A. and an M.A. in English/Creative Writing/Literature from the University of Memphis, a PhD in Higher Education Leadership from Seton Hall University, and a certificate from Harvard University's Graduate School of Education.
Artist Anna Schuleit and composer Yotam Haber collaborated on a project inspired by The Voice Imitator, a collection of 104 short stories by Thomas Bernhard. The artist made 104 mixed media drawings/paintings to correspond with the music Haber created inspired by the stories. Schuleit's other works can be seen at www.anna-schuleit.com.
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