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
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