Oh so sad. I wondered recently where Candice was and how she was. We had a
million emails and discussions over the poetryetc anthology, and I truly
enjoyed her take on poems submitted.
I'd like to share two Candice stories with you.
Firstly, when I was doing an MA, my supervisor, poet Andrew Taylor, threw a
quote at me from Fredric Jameson. He expected me to use it as a theme in
part of my thesis, but I had no idea where it was from. In desperation, I
threw it out to people on this list. Candice disarmingly replied, 'Would you
like me to ask him?' Not only was the guy alive but Candice worked for him.
Second story. This list went off at a tangent once (fancy that) and we all
talked about our favourite music and musicians. Candice mentioned a concert
with Bela Fleck, and I asked who he was. Not only did she give me an
expansive answer, but in the mail some time later I received a double CD set
of Bela Fleck live in concert. What a generous and kind thing to do. (I
replied sometime later with a CD by the Pigram Bros, a unique band of mixed
race people from Broome - to which she replied that their music was
pleasant, but not really her bag. Gentle.)
Now she is gone. I'll dig out her Wild Honey Press book and read it again.
Andrew
On 29 October 2010 07:04, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Candice and I had the sort of serious fights that only committed friends
> can have. She was generosity itself, even when we were at each other's
> throats (but mostly we weren't). When I needed it she came up with a key
> recommendation that opened doors for me in Cuba. She spent a week at my
> place in San Diego it must be ten years ago--a great time. I invited over
> the local crowd--Rothenbergs, Antins, etc., who she utterly charmed. What a
> wit she had. Though her poetry sometimes baffled me, and some of her
> readings, I also always admired their fierce intelligence. And the poem
> you've chosen, Randolph, is wonderful. The last years were sad, I think,
> though she rarely let on.
>
> I haven't the heart to purge my address book. Though the dead begin to
> crowd out the living.
>
> Mark
>
>
>
> At 02:29 PM 10/28/2010, you wrote:
>
>> I write this with tears in my eyes.
>>
>> Candice's cousin has just emailed me to let me know that Candice died
>> suddenly this week. I don't know the circumstances.
>>
>> Who can forget the verve she brought to her _Snaps_ on PoetryEtc? A
>> wonderful person and writer.
>>
>> I append one of her many magnificent poems.
>>
>> Randolph
>>
>> *The Moon Sees the One*
>>
>> /I see the Moon//
>> /And the Moon sees me/
>> /And the Moon sees the one/
>> /I long to see//
>> (children's song)
>>
>> /You'll find your ignorance is blissful//
>> /Every goddamn time//
>> (Tom Waits,"Heart Attack & Vine")
>>
>>
>> the moon sees to night at the end
>> of its rope, beached to blot
>> by remote the one way back
>>
>> a baker's blank so white, so late
>> as the face on magritte's mother
>> undercover still a looker (me
>>
>> with my aptitude for pathos-
>> of-distance learning): listen,
>> duckling, it goes for the throat
>>
>> thrush or strep, whistle-stopped
>> as the little red train makes
>> tracks, makes history of us
>>
>> putting a saint in it and pulling
>> away, while overhead the night
>> gowns for cover (her face)
>>
>> all wet but none the wiser than
>> what is /is/ left of memory: your
>> darrow songs, my debs rebellion
>>
>> for in your father's house
>> of cheats are too many
>> dimensions---and the moon
>>
>> looks on, indifferent to
>> its own mystery, to
>> the children gazing back
>>
>> from an orphan age
>> already history
>>
>
>
>
> New from Chax Press: Mark Weiss, As Landscape.
> $16. Order from http://www.chax.org/poets/weiss.htm
>
>
> "What a beautiful set of circumstances! What a lovely concatenation of
> particulars. Here is the poet alive in every sense of the word, and through
> every one of his senses. Instead of missing a beat or a part, Weiss’
> fragments are like Chekhov’s short storiesthe more that gets left out, the
> more they seem to contain… One can hear echoes from all the various
> ancestors...[but] the voice, at its center, its core, is pure Mark Weiss.
> His use of the fragment is both elegant and bafflingly clear, a pure musical
> threnody…[it] opens a window, not only into a mind, but a person, a
> personality, this human figure at the emotional center of the poem."
>
> M.G. Stephens, in Jacket.
> http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-weiss-rb-stephens.shtml
>
--
Andrew
http://hispirits.blogspot.com/
'Mother Waits for Father Late' republished available at
http://www.picaropress.com/
http://www.qlrs.com/poem.asp?id=766
http://frankshome.org/AndrewBurke.html
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