Rubato is not the only approach in music, stealing a bit of a beat from one note to give it to the next. Fermato – the bird’s eye – stops the count altogether, however briefly.
As if time in daily life is all that mechanical. Some days, after all, after longer than others. Or some minutes seem to go on forever, unlike others that leave us breathless.
Now, back to that matter of Rubato …
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For these poems and more, visit Thistle/Flinch editions.
Steal away, steal away home, as the spiritual sings. That’s the essence of Rubato, poems in the chords of life on my way to here.
There’s much blazing in pain and desire, as well as denial and, well, pretense painful to relive. But it’s true to the path, all the same.
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For these poems and more, visit Thistle/Flinch editions.
I could imagine myself an orchestral conductor, but there are many things that must be trusted to the players themselves. Something like Rubato, within a musical phrase, comes to mind. And then, in a flash, it’s passed. Reflect on that with these poems.
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For these poems and more, visit Thistle/Flinch editions.
Matters of what’s stolen in the course of a life – time, affection, even a glimpse – give flexibility to the rhythm of these poems. In music, the technique’s called Rubato. Blame the Italians, if you will, though I won’t go there in this collection.
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For these poems and more, visit Thistle/Flinch editions.
All along, I’ve felt a ping of guilt when taking time to write poetry or fiction. As if I’ve been stealing from others, even when I was living alone. Rubato, in Italian, means theft, although in music it’s applied as a way of making a phrase more flexible and ultimately sensual. And here it enters, as a dimension of my life journey.
What, then, is honest and what comes across as fake in a deep desire for love and affirmation?
I’ll let these poems sing and shout and lament on their own. I’ve somehow survived their transitions.
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For these poems and more, visit Thistle/Flinch editions.
Once upon a time, I was one of those whose body seemed to end at his neck. I lived almost entirely in my head. Intellect was everything.
And then I made contact with a host of previously foreign sensations – things I’d previously merely viewed. The exchange, for the most part, was marvelous. Let’s start with the feel of my lover’s skin to my touch. Or her lips on mine.
In time, she pointed me toward yoga, which really opened my inner vision. Much of the process I describe in my novel Ashram, starting with the response to the direction, “Touch your toes.”
The poems of my newest collection, Foreign Exchange, continue to probe the universe of surfaces – as well as much that lurks underneath.
So much seems to depend on style. Surfaces and appearances, especially. And yet style can also be a matter of structure and form that supports what’s viewed or stroked.
And then there’s the reality of taste, extending beyond the tongue and food. Taste as it intersects with style.
A poet, like any other artist, has an additional appreciation of style as it becomes an individual, distinctive voice.
Sometimes these are within oneself or domestic. More often, they’re “out there,” where interaction often turns into a Foreign Exchange, as my latest collection of poetry observes.
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For these poems and more, visit Thistle/Flinch editions.
