[EDITOR’S NOTE. Writes Ron Silliman of Weiss’s workings here and across the years: “This is a barefoot poetry, almost in the very oldest Asian sense of that phrase, a poetry of voice and body that recognizes that even body-language has accents, which surely it does. The eye is keen, the humor self-deprecating. Mark Weiss has reached that point on life’s mesa where forgiveness (to oneself as well as others) may well be the most important of gestures. A book to make you glad to be in the world.”]
BY WAY OF THE SEASON
1
After its struggle the gazelle surrenders to the lion’s grip, useless to fight. Does it think then, does it think ‘if only I’d dodged to the right. If only. Maybe next time.’ As the cat disembowels it and begins to feed.
Farewell to the hills farewell to the herd farewell to water hole and tender grasses and the joy of the young at the teat.
[In response to questions about my use of traditional gematria as a means of poetic composition, the following sampler draws poems from two books of mine previously published and still, I believe, in circulation: Gematria, Sun & Moon Press, 1994, and Gematria Complete, Marick Press, 2009. That the works were part of an ongoing dialogue between myself and Jackson Mac Low may also be worth noting.]
[Rochelle Owens has been working over the last several decades on a corpus of poems in-series, while her later work, however refined, has maintained the unique power and pitch ascribed to her earlier poetry by Marjorie Perloff, among others; “Rochelle Owens’ writing ... is sui generis. She is, in many ways, a proto-language poet, her marked ellipses, syntactic oddities, and dense and clashing verbal surfaces recalling the long poems of Bruce Andrews and Ron Silliman.
The President of Desolation & Other Poems, Black Widow Press
The Mystery of False Attachments: 150 Fragments, Word Palace Press
Un Libro de Voces (an extended interview with poems and essays), edited and translated into Spanish by Javier Taboada and Ricardo Cáceres, Mangos de Hacha, Mexico
[Six prose poems previously published in Kenyon ReviewOnline (January 2015) which will be in Amish Trivedi’s new book from Shearsman, out in January 2019. The title poem of Your Relationship to Motion Has Changed originally appeared in Omni-Verse in 2012.]
Poems and poetics