The Triumph of Song
I mean, the only zone I think I mightKnow, and by ‘know’ I mean ‘this thing hasn’tQuite killed me yet’ is the triumph of song.All my poems mean that, I think, really —This is the edge of my observableUniverse: I can’t see what does not sing,Or what I have not coaxed notes from out ofThin air. Like the first time I must have heardStrawberry Fields Forever. I was twelveAnd cupped the soft black sponges to my earsWhile sitting cross-legged on a friend’s twin bedAs the janky copy of the cassetteCopied over my memory of whereI was, with whom I was, and even whoI was. All I remember is the song,All that confident lack of confidence,Which is what making art is really like.The dark blood zoning forward and backwardIn the brain, the heart like grass in a bowl,And the burning horizon’s sharp swaggerAll of it part physics, part faith, part void.
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- February 19, 2023
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Copyright © 2022 by Rowan Ricardo Phillips.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is a highly acclaimed, multi-award-winning poet, author, screenwriter, academic, journalist, and translator. His poetry collections include The Ground (FSG, 2012), Heaven (FSG, 2015), Living Weapon (FSG, 2020), and the forthcoming Silver (FSG, 2024). He is also the author of When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (a new edition of which is forthcoming from FSG) and the nonfiction book The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey. His translations, primarily from Catalan, have appeared widely; including his translation of Salvador Espriu’s classic short-story collection Ariadne and the Grotesque Labyrinth (Dalkey Archive, 2012). Phillips has written on contemporary art for Artforum as well as for David Kordansky Gallery. In 2021, an exhibition inspired by one of Phillips’ poems, “The Beatitudes of Malibu” debuted at the David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles. Phillips is a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine, the President of the Board of the New York Institute of the Humanities, and the poetry editor of The New Republic.
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