September 2024
Bio Note: I have the good fortune to live in a beautiful part of Northern New Mexico with open vistas and Taos Ski Valley just 15 minutes away, and to be a longtime faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Vermont College of the Fine Arts, a program that has ever invigorated my passion for teaching and given me a priceless literary community. My seventh poetry collection, Unruly Tree (just out from University of New Mexico Press) offers poems spun off of Brian Eno’s and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies (For Composers Who Are Stuck), in which I allowed each quirky “strategy” to launch me into unknown territory and find footing in ever new ways, just as Eno and Schmidt intended. The project got me exploring music and art as well as poetry, and overall celebrating from many angles the process of making. I offer two poems from that collection here.
Emphasize differences
Drum speaks thunder
and hobnail on stone; violin
speaks breeze, bird trill, and trellis;
flute, snowmelt and silver; clarinet,
ebony; French horn speaks brandy and red
livery; trombone, early autumn sun
if it’s not too loud, not bonfire set by small boys….
Oboe knows all the animal tongues, and tuba
the tongues of the old country—anyone’s old country—
beer keg and packed dirt, boots thumping
joyful and a little drunk. When this gathering
listens, when the maestro leads it
in listening, when all of them listen
through the composer’s ear that heard a single
layered voice rising from inked notes
even after he lost his hearing, they make
a superior voice of voices,
a persuasion that exerts no force
but fills the warrior with kindness, the despot
with self-forgetfulness, the poor with abundance,
the world with a reason to save itself.
from Unruly Tree, UNM Press
Work at a different speed
You could go as O’Hara says
on your nerve—compose
as though chased by thugs—launch
yourself into unfamiliar neighborhoods
without a plan. Welcome unexpected
collisions. Lose your way and then
find it outside your bandwidth.
Beyond the used-up signals.
*
Or wander outside. Pull weeds.
Pump the bike tires. Cut up
a melon. Soak the orchid—
how about a fistful
of trail mix or
cup of tea? —let the piece
sneak up & finish
itself. No one has to
know how fraught
with procrastination, how
incremental, the work
of not working. Yesterday
I beheld, marveling, a rock-
strewn slash of moraine
as finished sculpture
amid a stand of spruces,
not the glacier
that melted it there.
*
Or wait.
Be cathedral space.
Keep two doors open, one
for in and one for out.
Out is the crucial door.
A small something not-you
will stay. Make an altar (this
was never about pace).
from Unruly Tree, UNM Press
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to say what it is about the poem you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL