Lief To Be Alive

Charles Bernstein in the introduction to Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word in a description come injunction invites the reader to enter into a site of openness.

The most resonant possibilities for poetry as a medium can be realized only when the performance of language moves from human speech to animate, but transhuman, sound: that is, when we stop listening and begin to hear; which is to say, stop decoding and begin to get a nose of the sheer noise of language.

This getting of a nose for noise leads me to quote three lines from Barbara Carey ("flawed by belief" in Undressing the Dark) where the task of pronouncing "live" with long or short vowel almost causes the reader to stumble and in turn tumble in a new-found appreciation for the folds of the semantic field.

because to believe
is to be live

is to out live

This yoking of faith to being alive through minute shifts in sounds can be imagined as a constant refreshment. See "Pips in a Watermelon" The Jupiter Collisions Lachlan Mackinnon.

[...] But if faith is a way
it's a perpetual beginning, a setting forth
like that of words into the unknown
minutes and years in which they will disclose
their meaning [...]

"A nose for noise" involves being sensitive to the gap between the "unknown" and the "unknown minutes and years". Dilution. Evolution. Concentration.

And so for day 1129
15.01.2010