ANYTHING ON ITS SIDE

Take it

every atom of me

belongs to you

across distances

one space

a photograph

or a morgue

or hospital

or anything

on its side

__________

Looked out the window

bird was

idea

nth

moment

the wing

Alice Notley

PARTS OF A WEDDING

Fate: "That which has been spoken"

about you, will lie down on

the ground with, any time,

day, any weather, there in that

park, or any other Earth, I

would.

I was born in the sensational

autumn of this day

Woke up and waking each night

first word I think of very distressed or free-like

Chaos Earth Love Night

Were before the Fates

(As I was)

should be really

dirty

And the sensuous history of the

bitter dying universe play to

against the window

memory fill

a fillet for the head, of what

metal

on the map of the floor

These are fairly

light-hearted dreams:

I sit with you with

our feet up

talking & smiling

to

get from one moment

to the next, how you always

do

like color

well why what? why can’t

Bringers forth Portions Spinners

"your credit’s a lot colder

you’re not so much in captivity"

Nathaniel Mackey

From: Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol

What I wish to do is work Sound and Sentiment together with Sound and Symbol in such a way that the latter’s metaphysical accent aids and is in turn abetted by the former’s emphasis on the social meaning of sound. What I’m after is a range of implication which will stretch. to quote Stanley Crouch, "from the cottonfields to the cosmos." You notice again that it’s black music I’m talking about, a music whose "critique of our concept of reality" is notoriously a critique of social reality, a critique of social arrangements in which, because of racism, one finds oneself deprived of community and kinship, cut off. The two modes of this critique which I’ll be emphasizing Robert Farris Thompson notes among the "ancient African organizing principles of song and dance":

suspended accentuation patterning (offbeat phrasing of melodic and choreographic accents); and, at a slightly different but equally recurrent

level of exposition, songs and dances of social allusion (music which, however danceable and "swinging," remorselessly contrasts social imperfections against implied criteria for perfect living).

Still, the social isn’t all of it. One needs to hear, alongside Amiri Baraka listening to Jay McNeely, that "the horn spat enraged sociologies." but not without noting a simultaneous mystic thrust. Immanence and transcendence meet, making the music social as well as cosmic, political and metaphysical as well. The composer of "Fables of Faubus" asks Fats Navarro, "What’s outside the universe?"