THE BOOK THAT WROTE ITSELF

THANK YOU, Chris Murray, for this post. Actually, we all know Chris Murray is the one who "rocks!"

Chris' post actually hearkens a dimension ("hearkens a dimension"? Sorry, this is in the midst of JUST the first cuppa java of the day) of The Light ... which I've been discussing recently backchannel with some of youse. You know that saying about how a Poem writes itself? Well, The Light... is one where the Book wrote Itself (who'da thunk it'd have such a huge ass?).

"Because I am stuck in the swamps of the unutterable," to paraphrase Rebeka Lembo, I told the Book: Go Ahead: Write Yourself!

So, for example, when one of Chris' students, Cody McAfferty of Austin, Texas wrote a hay(na)ku on death, that came to be part of the book.

Relatedly, a Peep had asked why, in various parts of the book, more than one version of a translation was presented (with Rebeka Lembo's involvement as translator, for which I'm grateful). For example, Rebeka translated some of the poems as much as three times in the same language.

I said, "I could say that I'm not sufficiently fluent in Spanish to choose among the three versions, and that would be true. But more significantly, I wanted the Book to write itself so when a translator presented (unexpectedly) three versions of the same poem, I featured them all. And it synchronistically reflects how we often have to try to say something more than once before we can say what we mean (and sometimes we continue blathering and still are unable to say what we want to say)."

Jose Garcia Villa once wrote a powerful poem about a pianist with no hands....

It's also interesting to see what people choose to highlight among the poems in the book, in this case, Chris chose a collaboration with Nick Carbo -- "SUN RISE!"

And the sun has risen.