Stasis and Flight
They are by temperament different. By métier, poets. Both attentive to detail.
Sandra Kasturi in Come Late to the Love of Birds, just before her homage to Ursula K. Le Guin, has a poem, "Bird Logic", which ends in a way that sets up marvellously the themes that follow in the poem to Le Guin which ends on a couplet ("Let pages turn as they may and locks come undone; / Let one world unravel, as another's begun.") which comes as an echo of the two concluding stanzas of the previous poem "Bird Logic"
Be carefulI just so happens that a few days later I came across the passage from Jan Zwicky in Forge towards the end of a sequential poem "Practising Bach" (apologies for not doing the typography justice)
when birds are sleeping:
sometimes they're dreaming the universe
and you in it.
I woke a bird once
but he was from another universe
and I was from another dream
so it all worked out in the end.
This may also be thought of as the problem of metaphor: the metaphor's truth, its charge of meaning, depends on the assertion of identity and difference, on erotic coherence and referential strife, on meaning as resonance and meaning revealed through analysis.The one describes the other. Despite their very varied ways of approaching matter, diction (you know a Kasturi poem from a Zwicky poem like you know apple from orange) and despite the different ways they unravel words and knit worlds — they let us fly and bring us by an abrupt turn to the spot where stopping seems just.
And so for day 1009
17.09.2009
