'If you make art, there is a sense of eternity'
My favorite poem in a while … and months behind on The New Yorker, there are far too few crossing my path … is "Ocean," by Jason Shinder, on Slate this week. Shinder is dead, and the poem is about death. But you don't have to read it that way. When you hear his friend read the poem in the audio version, the friend sounds somber as can be. But when I read the poem before I listened, I didn't hear it that way.
Even after listening, learning still later about the passing, I don't hear the work that way. The great thing about free verse, not only can you hunt for your own meaning, but you can strive for your own sound.
Good bye again. Say there is a little song in my head
And because of it I can't sleep or change my mind
About the future. Now the song runs all the way down
To the beach where I sit as if the sky…
"His poems are the evidence of his belief in the sustaining power of poetry — that if you make art, there is a sense of eternity," another friend says in an appreciation. If you join in art, letting yourself hear the songs in your head, or hear the songs in the poem in your head, eternity may be out of reach, but you do get a sense of tomorrow.
Thinking some on how friends move from creating art to sharing it.
June 5th, 2009 at 11:43 AM
Enjoyed the poem and your comments. I also like free verse because the reader chooses the musicality, which partially constructs sound and some meaning.
In a show this weekend and engaging those head songs nightly – where does mine find encounter with the world, and how can it find chorus with other performers, with the choreographer's structures? Maybe eternity is found in moments, like subdividing a beat or number infinitely, instead of by expansion. I think I grow momentarily younger and older, and on the whole I hope to accumulate increasing fineness: more discrimination, more perception, more nuanced understandings, more ambiguity.
June 6th, 2009 at 6:03 AM
[...] Cousin Nic, in yesterday's comments: "In a show this weekend and engaging those head songs nightly — where does mine find [...]