seen from France
seen from United States
seen from Israel
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Argentina
seen from United States
seen from Poland
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Brazil
seen from Russia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States
My thoughts dream off into the distance and then return to me in different shapes; I like music for exactly that reason—the way it carries thoughts off and returns them.
John Cotter, Losing Music: A Memoir (Milkweed Editions, April 11, 2023)
Your cover is over. This poem is a hex.
*
from “APESHIT” by JOHN COTTER AND SHAFER HALL
Life does not guarantee rewards to those who “work hard and play by the rules,” and it never has. The only good is kindness, and nature doesn’t urge it on us.
John Cotter, Losing Music: A Memoir (Milkweed Editions, April 11, 2023)
If it’s true that circumstance reveals character, it is equally true that circumstance becomes character. Like trees, we bend to the shape of the light that falls.
John Cotter, Losing Music: A Memoir (Milkweed Editions, April 11, 2023)
We don't deserve each morning's sunrise
Albert Camus called the feeling of the absurd—the feeling, for example, that my ears might be dying for no real reason; that I didn’t cause this, or that few of us cause all the misfortune that befalls us, or particularly deserve it (nor would we particularly deserve reprieve; we don’t deserve each morning’s sunrise)—a sensation of “sin without God.” In Camus’s metaphysics, the only thing to do in the face of the absurd is to revolt: to look the absurd in the eye and to carry on, to insure the absurd does not break you.
— John Cotter, Losing Music: A Memoir (Milkweed Editions, April 11, 2023)
And how should I live—how should I regulate my emotional life, my expectations of the world—when health could be given or taken away so capriciously? When it might worsen again at any moment, or might hold off indefinitely? When so much that mattered rode the currents of fate? Or of luck?
John Cotter, Losing Music: A Memoir (Milkweed Editions, April 11, 2023)
Life afforded no pause. Slack your pace and you’re finished.
John Cotter, Losing Music: A Memoir (Milkweed Editions, April 11, 2023)
"Hush,” she said.
“Hush,” she said, and she held the hush. Slam poetry, then thoroughly derided in academic circles, is about as close as our culture comes to the kind of half-chant epics Homer would have known, or that Parry and Lord found in the Serbo-Croatian folk songs of the 1930s. Done well, it can have the same effect—like the best music, it makes us complicit in its progress; like the best stories, it moves quick and bright. And we hush.
— John Cotter, Losing Music: A Memoir (Milkweed Editions, April 11, 2023)
