#orchises press

[bostonpoetryslam]

Music could not save you, nor the words that gather in my mouth like angry flames of hope. I have swallowed your eyes, lived on them for years, made them into coins for beggars, for bankers in their mausoleums of flesh.

Barbara Hamby, “The Hunter,” from The Alphabet of Desire

[bostonpoetryslam]

How many times can you see God before you realize his face is different every time?

Barbara Hamby, “The Dream of the Red Drink,” from The Alphabet of Desire

[bostonpoetryslam]

Let us go mad, my darlings, with news, information, facts, the concupiscence of catastrophe, the evil thrill of our present dilemma, the bright confederacy of all that can go wrong, the bombs, my beauties, the grenades, the undetonated chaos packed tight inside everyone like Mae West in her cantilevered whale-bone corset.

Barbara Hamby, “Millennium Rave,” from The Alphabet of Desire

[poetsplaylist]

Terri Witek on

EXIT ISLAND   (Orchises Press, 2012)

  Last night (as so often happens), Ariadne was abandoned by the captain of a great ship (Theseus/the thesis).  Fortunately, she washed up on the island of Naxos with the poetry books of Fernando Pessoa.  As his last name means only “a person” and he writes as 70+ other identities (his heteronymns), Ariadne feels her own personhood stagger.  Also, he writes in Portuguese, a language she does not quite understand.  Is this enough to shake her out of her myth?  What to do about Dionysus (already cresting over the hill) and the circlet of stars tossed into the sky she’s destined to become?

    “Cucuruccucu Paloma” by Caetano Veloso  

This song, a showstopper midway through Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her, undid me--maybe I’ve never recovered.  Caetano is Brazilian, of course--I spent one year in Brazil when I was 17 and Portuguese was a ghost.   But why couldn’t I follow this so-beautiful song?  My friend and collaborator Cyriaco Lopes finally told me the lyrics were Spanish.  I realized I knew nothing about languages but CL would be a big help.  I told him I was trying to write about Ariadne.  He told me he had just been to her house on Naxos.

  “Os Argonautas” by Caetano Veloso/ Chico Buarque

I began listening to Caetano and other Brazilian MPB artists non-stop.  I had always loved the line “it is necessary to sail/ it is not necessary to live,” which I first read at a castle residency in Scotland.  Here it was again, sung by two men together in Portuguese, almost like a sailor’s chanty.   I wrote a chanty for the sailors who would stay afloat during Exit Island.  Only later did I discover the line I loved is originally Fernando Pessoa’s.

  “Aguas do Marco” by Elis Regina/ Antonio Carlos “Tom” Jobim

When I left Brazil just after my 18th birthday, I was clutching albums by Chico Buarque, Gilberto Gil, and the very young Elis Regina.  Once I lost the album I had never heard Elis again until I was writing Exit Island.  Only then did I learn that she had died untimely.  My playlist happily held this word-play duet with the graciously light-handed Tom Jobim, which is still such untragic fun and shows all the playful possibilities of doubleness in language.  I still can’t quite follow it all, exactly, but thought of it when I made the comic book version of Ariadne’s young love story.

  “Monologo de Orfeu” by Maria Bethania

If Ariadne ever learns whatever language they speak on that island, I hope she’ll sound just like Maria Bethania: smoky, low, alone even when she’s singing with others.  I could put a dozen songs in this spot but particularly love when MB recites this passage of poetry in the middle of an album.  As a voice, is she Orpheus or Eurydice?   When we speak a myth, do we change it?   

   “Smoke Rings” by Laurie Anderson

“Que es mas macho—lightbulb o school bus?”

Of course Ariadne in many earlier versions ends up with 2 husbands.  But why be so bourgeois?  Putting unlike things together is a poet’s job: it’s what metaphors do, of course, and what Ariadne’s brother make literal and mythic in his own double body.  How far are we willing to go, Laurie Anderson seems to ask.  But it’s only ‘necessary to sail’--I close the book with a villanelle that is also a rocking caravela (a ship of discovery) The Voyage of the Minotaur.   The villanelle’s repeating lines are in Portuguese, and by Fernando Pessoa. 

  “E Doce Morrer no Mar”  (“It’s Sweet to Die in the Sea”) by Cesaria Evora / Marisa Monte

As an Azorian and a Brazilian, Evora and Monte speak different Portugueses—they are also voices from different generations.   But this old song in their mouths is hair-rising—they are both sirens and sailors as their voices float with/against each other.   To me this song is the coda —the lyrics in both languages were pinned to my studio wall as I was completing Exit Island.  But the bookactually ends with a suite of photos by my Brazilian visual artist friend Cyriaco Lopes—the myth passes, as I hope it always will, into another art, another hand.

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