okay, on and off, for about three years.
this gentleman came to the iowa writing workshop when i was there [junior year of high school], talked about writing and poetry, and read this poem. i remember thinking that he was extremely intelligent, and precise, and softspoken. a bit metaphysical, but very human.i wish i had written to him and asked him for this, because it hadn't been published yet-
but here. i think i listened to it, and was electrified. it has to be spoken out loud, perhaps only in his timbre- reading it now to myself, i can't quite get the same effect. and this may be hallucination, but i think he said this originated from an image, or another poem, of two men in a holocaust camp, looking up at a wire, a bird dancing upon it.
______
Twittering Machine
by dan beachy-quick
I see I must rewire the Twittering Machine
Whose song was lightning
when lightning-struck—
And then sang singe, sang smoke: elect
-ric elegy, perpetual elegy, the fuse
That fused syllable to
sound is blown, is
Blown, and now the dry-throat on noting
Nothing drowns. The gold-sheathed wire
Soldered to star
sang both the star
’s celestial thread that fretting through
The night kept the night a needle-width
Undone, and sang
yellow the yellow
Thread unmending the sundress wife kept
In closet December-long. And longer:
Through darker months
none could name, none
Name—since, ever since, that star whose light
Powered the Twittering Machine’s ever-song
Died, was always dead,
though nightly seen,
Is still seen, cold but brilliant overhead. The gold
-sheathed wire withered, tangent to the moon.
Now a fungal-wire aches
down cemeteries
To find a decaying song. Earth-battery—
It winds the dynamo by a ceaseless, clock-
Work turn, clock-
wise turn,
But the Twittering Machine refuses song.
No, no—not refuse, not refuse. We’ve rewired
The mechanism. Stars
are silent, trustless:
They lock the dark vault they seem to pierce.
Music of the spheres? buzz, no test-pattern,
Program cancelled, shut.
Now one dark talon
Sheathed in darkness drops unseen from sky
And scratches the earth as the earth turns.
Do you hear that sound
of gravel on gravel
Grinding? That music is our music now.
________
4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why?
...Another influence, though quite different, was in studying the Blues tradition in America, from slaves’ field hollers to juke joints of the Mississippi Delta to the City Blues of Chicago. I love the way in which one musician would hear another play, take a lyric or a lick from him, and incorporate that into another song. That expanding voice of Anonymity unfolding in each individual mouth moves me greatly, and seems, in my mind, to parallel how tradition functions in poetry. This ties back, actually, to the question about philosophy—for it’s just as Seneca said when writing letters to his young Stoic. He’d often end a letter with a quote from his philosophic nemesis Epicurus, and say something to the effect of: “You ask me why I mention his words? Because what is true is everyone’s.”
