Visiting Artists and Writers
 Katherine Porter |
 Andrew Ginzel |
 Colin Chase |
 Myrna Harrison |
Dear John, Dear Coltrane
By Michael Harper
a love supreme, a love supreme
a love supreme, a love supreme
Sex fingers toes
in the marketplace
near your father’s church
in Hamlet, North Carolina–
witness to this love
in this calm fallow
of these minds;
there is no substitute for pain:
genitals gone or going,
seed burned out,
you tuck the roots in the earth,
turn back, and move
by river through the swamps,
singing: a love supreme, a love supreme;
what does it all mean?
Loss, so great each black
woman expects your failure
in mute change, the seed gone.
You plod up into the electric city–
you song now crystal and
the blues. You pick up the horn
with some will and blow
into the freezing night:
a love supreme, a love supreme–
Dawn comes and you cook
up the thick sin ‘tween
impotence and death, fuel
the tenor sax cannibal
heart, genitals and sweat
that makes you clean–
a love supreme, a love supreme–
Why you so black?
cause I am
why you so funky?
cause I am
why you so black?
cause I am
why you sweet?
cause I am
why you so black?
cause I am
a love supreme, a love supreme:
So sick you couldn’t play Naima,
so flat we ached
for song you’d concealed
with your own blood,
your diseased liver gave
out its purity,
the inflated heart
pumps out, the tenor kiss,
tenor love:
a love supreme, a love supreme–
a love supreme, a love supreme–
Watch
By Eamon Grennan
1.
Watching it closely, respecting its mystery,
is the note you’ve pinned above this heavy Dutch table
that takes the light weight of what you work at,
coaxing the seen and any mystery it might secrete
into words that mightn’t fall too far short, might let you
hear how the hum of bees in the pink fuchsia
and among the buttercups and fat blackberries
is echoed by that deep swissshhh sound that is
your own blood coursing its steady laps
and speaking in beats to the drum of your left ear.
2.
When you watch the way the sycamore leaf curls,
browns, dries, and drops from the branch it’s lived on
since spring, to be blown by a soundless breeze
along the seed heads of the uncut grass, then
the mystery that is its movement—the movement,
that is, from seed to leaf-shard and so on
to fructive dust—holds still an instant, gives a glimpse
of something that quickens away from language
into the riddling bustle of just the actual as you
grab at it and it disappears again, again unsaid.
June Visiting Artists and Writers:
Sigrid Nunez
Susanna Coffey
Nayland Blake
Carol Hepper
John
Lees
Lee
Abbott
-Jean Dubuffet