DIRGE: a ballet for 13 dancers [prelude with cellos]

1 dancer [hazel]

I slept in the Book of the Dead and woke with parchment scrolls blooming tired magnolias from my unhinged mouth.

Lugubrious cellos attempted to climb me back to the mud-encrusted, brick floor–but I panicked.

When my thinking can trace some semblance of surface, I might explain.

Some will pigeonhole verbose.

If I erase, the Dreams of the Dead multiply.

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3 Responses to DIRGE: a ballet for 13 dancers [prelude with cellos]

  1. Peter says:

    Yes. Yes, I wholly empathize:
    introduction by krysia jopek:

    I fell in love with the prose poems (in from Innuendos in a Minor Key) that Mike Cole sent me—the six seeds that morphed and evolved into this full-grown, granulated, virtual poetry show, a day’s dissolutions. The selections from the six unique poetry manuscripts that Mike chose function like six movements of a sonata, unified by his signature, seemingly-effortless tone and style that subtly carry the reader across the surface of precise language and syntax into new poetic territory again and again: “patina of offal,” “distillation of crushed star,” “where party lights are the eels’ fluorescence,” ”a galaxy of meanings/that look like stars,” and “birds were swept up in dust devils of spirit/that rendered them silent with dizziness.”

    The selection of poetry that follows exemplifies Mike Cole’s versatility with short, discreet prose poems; poems that utilize line breaks and complex enjambment/syntax; prose poetry (in the two selections from Missives) with a Beckettian even-keeled tone and discursiveness; poems with very short lines of ten in a perfect column structure; and very short poems. The statement of poetics that follows this extraordinary mini-ouvre allows readers to look through the window of this poet’s writing cabin and watch the poet wait for poetry to breathe itself into (human) being.

  2. “I slept in the Book of the Dead and woke with parchment scrolls blooming tired magnolias from my unhinged mouth.“ I slept in the Book of the Dead and woke with parchment scrolls blooming tired magnolias from my unhinged mouth.
    Simply, the BEST written line in modern civilization, anywhere. Freakin’ Eh!

    • Krysia Jopek says:

      Thank you!
      Great news–DIRGE: a ballet for 13 dancers is going to be published and available in a few months. It’s going to be about 50 pages with an introductory essay by a poet, so it will be a full-length book of poetry! I’ll send you one of my author copies!!

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