
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 Mothers, Lovhers, 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