Leo del Sol, “Flora”
~
It was while curating my uncle’s poems for this poetry collection that I stumbled upon Flora. At first it seems an almost saccharine, overly-inventive piece of writing where my uncle stumbles into a mistake he makes all too often – that of replacing style with substance. The difference here, and the reason why this made it into his anthology, is the sheer level of care which he put into the creation of Flora – a love letter to garden paths.
Altogether there are forty-five possible literal readings of this poem with the various threads running through each other. Within those forty-five another multitude of cultivated intentions. My uncle, without a doubt, attempted to capture – in its entirety – his own meandering path through existence. Each reading can be looked at as a day in his life, or an hour or a second as spoken to an invisible lover while they wander through a younger garden.
In his notebooks, to be released when I have found the time to condense their web of anachronous scrawlings into a logical and consistent manner, forty pages are dedicated to the production – and yes production is a very fitting word – of Flora (or For Laura in earlier drafts). He uses fold-out sheets of stuck-in A3 to map out each path, extensive annotations follow every path in a desperate – and I’m certain failed – attempt to limn all possible interpretations of the poem.
This care to detail can be seen in lines like ‘choosing a minor seventh, it’s a blue chord,’ where the A added to the notes in the section of Beethoven’s op. 135 reproduced (a segment my uncle almost certainly knew of from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in general he did not care for the early Romantics) forms a minor seventh, which is indeed a blue chord. The minor seventh, the chord and the colour blue all being bound by the chromaticism he sees in his lover.
Another line ‘in acquiring the semblance of change you acquire the semblance of a person’ is a reference to a Stewart Lee comedy sketch where he defines a ‘character’ as that which gives the semblance of a person.
My personal favourite nod to the Devil is the line ‘we’re mirrored’ where the p and the q on each side of the line are indeed mirrored by the line.
The layout of the poem on the page turns out to be somewhat intuitive, especially with repeat readings. The letters follow a vague ordering from top-left to bottom-right with one clear exception. This allows the following of set paths as my uncle desired whilst also allowing your gaze to be captured by other lines of other paths such that readings can be diverted, your eyes following their own ‘desire lines’.
My uncle, in his notes, spends a great deal of time considering how best to typeset his work. He proclaims in large, careless letters “JUSTIFICATION JUSTIFIES ITS EXISTENCE.” Which I think can often be used as an allegory for his entire corpus of work.
In any case I hope you don’t find my inclusion of this poem, which is certainly not his finest work, indulgent. I simply wanted to present to you the case that even in his most frivolous works my uncle dwelled deeply.
~ Julia del Sol
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Submitted to Notes on “Safe”