Friday, June 5, 2015

a stack of stutterers


Aaron Cohick of The Press at Colorado College sent me this fine picture of a pile of just completed sewings of Orpheus the stutterer : a poetics of silence, launched when I was in Colorado just prior to Codex 2013 in Berkeley, California - the book begins with three epigraphs - 

1) And it is no secret to any of you that the exact meaning of poetics is the study of work to be done (Igor Stravinsky -

2) in the beginning was the wor-wor-wor-wor-wor- (George South, stuttering -

3) the silence is vibrant with words (Ursula Bethell - 

what follows is a set of ruminations on the lyric, stuttering, the aptitude of the human species for killing itself - 

there's a lovely review of the book in Parenthesis magazine (# 26, Spring 2014) by John Harvey, in which he says 'Coming in an age when publishers are ever less willing to publish books that do not promise to best-sell (a promise seldom kept), Orpheus the stutterer is a premeditated worst-seller'. - a premise that one can only hope is also seldom kept - but the review is very positive and encapsulates much of a fragmentary text very well - 

here's a bit from the first page - 

what is it that each of us will never be permitted to say
and how vibrant with words
will that silence always be
and remain silence         however loud
the murmur of language
becomes in our becoming & unbecoming
rage to speak         in the beginning 
was the unutterable end
of the wor(l)d