folio : (further) short takes on the prose poem
Curious, I committed to writing only prose poems this year. ProsePo will help me to ____? Return to my early relationship with language? As a kid, I’d tell tall tales to my pals as we swung from trees. Such play has taken over my home life. My partner returned to acting, so furniture gets moved and bodies gesticulate; we vocalize in ways our howling Catahoula Leopard Dog has never heard. My partner’s favorite audition monologue is David Ives’ “A Singular Kinda Guy” about a New Yorker, on 30th and Lex, recognizing their kinship with an Olivetti model 250, portable electric: “No, really, I am typewriter.” It is hard for me to hear monologues and not want to write them.
Appaloosa
6-27-2023
“Ed,” I said. I said, “Ed… .” Ed was a talking horse in a talking box. My family let me talk a lot to concocted characters. “Ed,” I said. I said: “Ed, why can’t you be an Appaloosa?” Maybe Ed was an Appaloosa; I only ever got to see half of him. I assumed he was a Palomino like the one that lived across the street. I assumed the world was as I saw it. My family said I could be anything I wanted to be, but in the meantime, there were lots of rules to follow. One was to keep your hand flat when feeding the neighbors’ horse carrots. I love the sound of those big teeth chomping, but it is not the sound of talking. Ours was a small Montana town that still had wooden sidewalks and gravel roads. Dad walked to the high school where he taught, and mom walked out of our duplex and bought eggs and vegetables right from the Hutterites’ horse drawn wagon. Their horses were not Appaloosas either. We did not feed their horses because they were working. We did not talk to their horses because they were working. To be clear, I did not want to ride an Appaloosa. My family did not ride horses. I wanted to speak to a spotted being because I am a spotted being. My family was not speckled. I wanted Ed to be an Appaloosa because he was a concocted character, and I could talk to concocted characters. If I met a real Appaloosa, the pony would probably be working, so I wouldn’t be able to talk anyway. Are you an Appaloosa? I mean, dear reader, are you a concocted character?
I first overheard the six words, “Ed, I said. I said, Ed,” spoken on a plane by a loud man. It’s a gem, right? Rhyme, repetition, mirroring, a voice that loves its sound. Who can resist the prompt? Usually visuals or objects trigger prose poems for me. In January, we moved into house under repair. All our stuff was in storage. Shivering on an air mattress listening to torrential rain, I calmed myself by manipulating my favorite belongings in imaginary space. I fixated on two toys (an elephant and a sheep) and two art postcards: Arman Arman’s “Toccata et Fugue, 1962” and Løvaas & Wagle’s “Felt 2, 1999” (see https://buffaloakg.org/artworks/k19635-toccata-et-fugue and http://img.listen.no/copper/displayimage.php?album=33&pos=500). Arman’s sliced violins (synecdoche) haunt in their scored order while Løvaas & Wagle’s sloppy weaving of panty hose risk snags. I like to play between those two extremes through juxtaposition. When I animate objects it’s not exactly like Frances Ponge or Bruno Schulz and his Brothers Quay but more like the visual artist Diane Schaefer in her Rowdy Ruby photographic dioramas (see High Watermark Salo[o]n v.1 n. 5. https://loriandersonmoseman.com/archive/archive-2).
Cataclysm
1-16-2023
After a cataclysmic, variable scale-shift, the elephant found itself perched on a sea shell. Cat-size, the mini-ellie unfurls its trunk, reads wall art by feel. Despite its thick skin, the pachyderm senses how the framed sliced violins have elongated into cello cross-sections. Shouldn’t such scale-shifts trigger proportional changes in time signature? Everything I listen to is pianissimo and accelerando. I’m guessing the elephant’s fine hearing has no need for apocatastasis, no need to restore every instrument (or being) to its “appropriate” vibrating whole. Myself? I’ve shrunk into a tiny eardrum that buzzes YoYo Ma live from a mammoth cave. To calm myself, I fixate on a 2-inch toy sheep that’s now the size of a living lamb. It’s still stuck to its tiny wheeled wagon that could have grown to be a fine skateboard if it hadn’t resisted the scale-shift. Thank god, my house is the same size. Praise be to the builder who made it so damned level, so damn water-tight. Considering the circumstances (asbestos ceilings + formaldehyde flooring + atmospheric rivers), I applaud any structural stasis. For a day or two. A century of cataclysmic repetition gave us mass production. And what did we do? We stuffed giant plastic eggs with nylons of every hue. Now days, weather permitting, we take our bare legs out for a dance-n-dangle daily. Nonetheless, our art remains a weave of former restrictions. Warp. Weft. Nip. Tuck. Underachiever. Overachiever. False skins abound.
All my poems, if I am honest, are “journal entries” of what I am currently experiencing. My notebooks don’t record a day’s activities verbatim but capture visceral moments that spark. Then, I riff. Often, I turn to others’ words for energy. Lately, I’m taken by the zaniness and momentum in Benjamin Niespodziany’s prose poems. My piece below began in first person. In revision, I borrowed a character that materialized in my growing pile of prose poems. Souza responds to sounds with body movements. If I had an urge to use theory to articulate my poetics, I might turn to somatics. If I were to revisit interviews I gave in other decades, I can’t say I’d salvage any poetic jargon that was once vital to me. Lately, I’m immersed it C.D. Wright’s The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All; today, I am hovering over an entry, entitled “The Book that Jane Wrote.” (Jane is Jane Miller, one of my early mentors). “Movies, paintings, and books stream through the poet’s memory vault. They are called in ‘not [to] confuse reality but to illumine it.’ Perhaps to contribute a few cues—how to live, how to endure. Poetry’s privileged perch is not stable. ‘Poetry is speech by someone who is in trouble.’”
Friction
5-26-2023
Souza’s body wants to pitch itself over the balcony. Behind her, tiers and tiers of banked upholstered seats thrust her torso forward. She sits firmly, fidgets, then focuses on the first trumpet—dude’s got the best man bun here. Closing her eyes, she tries floating on the notes. Ignoring the 14 violins helps. Open-eyed, she ranks woodwinds by the complexity of their embouchure. Then, a virtuoso clarinetist stands for a solo: breath rides his body as he undulates air down to his feet then up and out over the reed. Sonic bliss. He rivets her to her chair. Raucous applause rattles her again. Free seats are free seats becomes her calming mantra. When nymph sounds scored by Ravel flood the stage, Souza’s agitation builds. She zeros in on the percussionist playing the triangle. All that training for stray tinkles. When pirates capture Chloé, cacophony crescendos so much she can’t tell if the voiceless choir is moaning or not. Souza’s mind jets to the cement pavilion where she paused before coming in here: four unhoused souls pummel each other; their companion canines snarl, howl. She almost screamed Tina’s name, but her niece isn’t doped-up near here. The girl never answers to that name anyway. On cue, a percussionist cranks an aeliophone. The wooden slat barrel grinds, scrapes a canvas sheath—a hideous grounding sound.
For Lori Anderson Moseman’s recent work, see Darn (Delete Press, 2021), Y (Operating System, 2019) and Flash Mob (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). Quietly Between, a 2022 poetry/photography collaboration is available from A Viewing Space. Okay and Too Few Words were above/ground press chapbooks in 2023. https://loriandersonmoseman.com
