from "Parrot Eyes Lust"
[note from the editor: if reading this poem on a mobile device, turn your device horizontally for proper formatting]
for Eliot HelferBeing 30° of Universe
One is
suddenly returned
as if waking
to daily life
All that bread
the Dutch eat
& I haven’t
gained two pounds
An Egyptian goose
a pair in fact
mixed in with the moorhens
What we thought of
as the Piazza
of bad paintings
In Italy I
saw hoopoes
& honey buzzards
in the hills
of Umbertide
But in Rotterdam
Chekov
is spelled Tsjekov
Breughel’s Tower of Babel
is much smaller
than I’d imagined
in the submarine factory
the carillon
is performing John Cage
I’m riding a bicycle
covered in goose down
The yeti –
there must be
a half dozen
wandering up & down Modoc –
seem more curious
than threatening
The leopards are scaring the dogs
What if
What if
What if
I spoke Galician or you English
The Basque were autonomous
or the Scots
She holds to her persona
as the itinerant
librarian
but you recognize that sadness
being screened
That snowman doesn’t understand
how door knobs work
It’s not
that they’re naked
what with all that white fur
but the pelts
seem more a gesture
than clothing
He just pees there on the porch
Each of the letters
in the word whale
might specify
a different tone
The leopards are smaller than I’d imagined
Poor Ron
says Chus
meaning my Spanish
trilling the R
In one corner of the warehouse
we found a spaceship
or possibly
a home of the future
of the past
Inside, everyone’s watching TV
the Yeti staring in
trying to figure what’s what
Try to imagine
myself without language
One’s own body
is an other
How to desire
without that word
or in advance of it
Ron Silliman
Ron Silliman has written and edited forty books of poetry, critical theory, and memoir, most recently The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Letters: Selected 1970s Correspondence of Bruce Andrews, Charles Bernstein, and Ron Silliman. His work has been translated into sixteen languages. Silliman’s anthology In the American Tree is the definitive gathering of language poetry and his own poetry is included in The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Poems for the Millennium, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, and Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. Among his awards, Silliman received the Levinson Prize from the Poetry Foundation in 2010, a Pew Fellowship, grants from the California and Pennsylvania Arts Councils, and two literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Silliman was a 2012 Kelly Writers House Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, a keynote poet of the 43rd Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, also in 2012, the subject of a panel at the 111th MLA Convention in 1995, a symposium at the University of Windsor in 2011, special issues of The Difficulties and Quarry West, and a Poets and Critics Symposium at the University of Paris in 2017. His sculpture From Northern Soul (Bury Neon) is installed in the transit center of Bury, Lancashire, where it is a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. Silliman’s Blog has received over 4 million visits.
Thomas Mazzarella
Thomas Mazzarella (born 1983) lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
With his pink and green hues, his windowsill views, flower vases and shelves, interiors looking outwards, hills and clouds in the distance, Thomas Mazzarella likes to paint moments of solitude. If everything seems frozen and immobile, time nonetheless flows by. A time of quietude, meditation and quest. Instead of jumping to conclusions, the artist seeks to linger - not so much as an escape, but simply to exist. His work is an ode to flânerie.
Thomas Mazzarella feeds on his readings and arms himself with the references that matter to him, returning again and again to his very personal atmospheres. It is a discreet melody where flower stems and grass shoots sway in the wind. The breeze rustles the curtains, pushes the clouds away. A figure sometimes glides from left to right, only to be seen from behind or in profile. It is in this movement, in this slow becoming, that lies the artist's true signature, inviting us to inhabit this time for ourselves.
(Claire Oberst-Rossicontemporary)