Aldon Nielsen, "Tray"
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Aldon Nielsen, William J. Harris, Tyrone Williams, hosted by Al Filreis, convened in the Arts Café of the Kelly Writers House, before a live audience, to discuss Aldon’s poem “Tray.” There are 29 sections in the poem; the group discussed the first 6. In the book titled Tray, published by Make Now Press in 2017, the title poem takes up the first 37 pages; the sections we discussed run to page 14. Usually, of course, we play an audio recording of the poem from we’re about to discuss as archived in PennSound, but on this day, because we had the honor of Aldon’s presence we asked him to perform those sections.
November 29, 2023
A slowing 7: The necessary elusive
Transience, that fleeting way of everything not staying: how can we understand the very condition as it slips through the mind’s slippery fingers? Once awake to its pervasiveness, transience appears everywhere: in poems, in spiritual doctrines, in life’s disappointments, in everything. This attention is a chasing sort of attention, moving always toward what is out of reach, trying to understand what is slipping past understanding. Yet to know this unknowable as pervasive fixes something. A perpetual chasing.