Geomantic riposte: 'White Piano'

Nicole Brossard is one of Québec’s leading poets, novelists, and literary theorists, and has published more than thirty books since 1965, including These Our MothersLovhers, Mauve Desert and Baroque at Dawn. Brossard also co-founded La Barre du Jour and La Nouvelle Barre du Jour, two important literary journals in Québec. She has won two Governor General's Awards for poetry, as well as le Prix Athanase-David and the Canada Council's Molson Prize, and her work has been translated into several languages. White Piano, the English translation of Brossard’s collection in French called Piano blanc, is interpreted with finesse by talented poets Robert Majzels and Erín Moure and coaxes the reader through a delicious chiaroscuro of musical conceits, often delicate études that run (rubato) up and down our minds through the neighbouring wall of language, in verse that is by turns brusquely startling and then out of nowhere eminently soothing.


White Piano by Nicole Brossard – translated by Robert Majzels and Erín Moure (Coach House Books, 2013, Page 44)

 

this morning language transformed

my mammal intentions

into one idea two lives exploded

in the chest

under my warm coat

one hour later of melancholy

all along the Spree

piano bang of keys in the arteries

  

Geomantic Riposte: Aesthetically

 

To harden arteries sounds pretty good         aesthetically

but Beethoven’s strings based on intestinal distress are

not the gross-uh fugue or one of his personal fugues

more midway transcription of sudden recovery but

google The Spree and you get a Jennifer Beals film

uploaded by The Sandy Bullock and anonymous truth:   

I cant say that this movie is in my top 5 of favourite

JB movies. But I watched it few times, why not, she plays

main part and it's nice to see her on the screen almost all

the time. And this time she isn't the cop)           This time I

ogled it and then Sandy Bullock (why not) for a few clicks

before returning to graphic plosives that imitate the most

non-descript movement of the “Waldstein” in lieu of human

sacrifice like that petroglyph with a plosive where the head

should go although aesthetically this is not in my top five

favourite GTM poems I’m totes gonna Unlike it later on