Bang on the Chasm

by Robert Mueller

I am wondering about new jazz and new art music, and separating them entirely for the convenience of entertaining these thoughts. I am thinking about consorting with a difference even though what I have to say about one has to be true of the other (again assuming for the purpose that they are separate). Specifically as a matter of degree I want to distinguish new jazz as a living production that arrives currently, spontaneously in the club or spontaneously also at a jam session or recording session, from the same scenario for new art music, which comes to us as a product, or object, that, when it arrives, may arrive in a public performance, but not currently. Rather, there is a delay, for reflection to take place, and even if it were to take place in the few moments after the performance has ended (that is, right then and there), it nevertheless arrives in the mode of delay.…

by Robert Mueller

The writing in Alan Gilbert’s volume of poetry, Late in the Antenna Fields (Futurepoem Books, 2011), feasts on sarcasm and dispirited bitterness, not to mention a certain snagging anomie.  Putting it better or worse, the reader might think to assimilate it to some kind of art adhesion.  One is led, or profited, to hear, and to sense and to pick at, a general vaguely petulant and vaguely disinterested and yet persistent patter of ambient petrified displeasure.  There is thus less of a danger than a foregone captation in this approach, inherently.  So far so good if it sticks; so far so good so long as it educates even, guides, charts and winnows.  But when notes of whining and griping swirl in, as they sometimes do, the reader may well wish to give pause.…

The sand would scrape itself

            I heard it whisper

as i breached the whitewashed torrent

            with my chest

emerging forth everclear and green

            drench-dripping in the first

positive moment

            hungry for the textures

of earth and flesh

            the mortal opacity.

I carved a monument, an easel.

            Then portrayed a pastoral.

I will try to find you there again

            around and behind every root and knoll

into the craters of every erosion and explosion

            straining

the furthest inherent peripherals.

The wind separates my limbs, it tousles

            the hair of the soldiering trees

I lie on my back and shape cloudshapes

            around your name

I lie here barren in your memory.

Spinning under the moon, hand in hand

            with the animals

into the torn lace outskirts of evenings

            the blue the pale the pagan

suckling an entirely different oxygen

            and I saw you there

your arms flung open

            the mouth of churches

                        spilling light.…