Tagged: cosmology

“Is there anybody…out there?”

A looooong interval between posts.

Well, what do you expect? I’m a working author, with a mind that doesn’t allow for much leisure or fun.

Mainly, I’ve been editing The Algebra of Inequality, my latest collection of poems. It has been an agonizing process, choosing the best poems from the past five years, winnowing out the rest. And sometimes a poem gets the chop not because it lacks tunefulness or thematic unity, but for other, more nebulous reasons. Somehow it just doesn’t quite fit with the rest. It’s a judgement call and often I had second, third and fourth thoughts, so the whole thing became ridiculously drawn out and fraught, dragging on for weeks.

But now it’s done. The interior layout is just about ready and my regular cover guy, Chris Kent, is hard at work on another doozie. I’ll be leaking a sneak peek of said cover in the coming days; it’s based on one of my paintings and, knowing Chris, it’s bound to be eye-grabbing.

Yes, what’s up with the painting, why has it become so important to me? Because when I haven’t been editing, I’ve been regularly making that trip down to my little basement dungeon and attacking canvases with acrylics, a screwdriver, awl, various other implements. Getting physical. The results are odd, distinctive, and the works tend to elicit interesting reactions from the people who see them. But it’s a thrill leaving text behind for awhile and working purely symbolically, utilizing a totally different area of my brain.

Recently, I’ve also completed a large, complex collage piece that may end up as the cover for my short story collection later this year.

One of the poems I lopped from The Algebra of Inequality was one I concocted a number of years ago, titled A Personal Cosmology. It has a strong, visual component. I used some square styrofoam and black paint to create a series of stark, geometric images. Then I employed “automatic writing” and started scribbling, one short prose bit for each of the six images. I think I posted one of these images and accompanying text a few years ago but, for the first time, this is the complete version of Cosmology.

I love this piece, it comes right from the soul, but it just wasn’t right for the collection.

It was one of the final cuts, a hard one to leave out.

Click on this link, scroll through it…enjoy:

A Personal Cosmology

 

New poem

Milky Way

They stopped counting at four hundred billion.
Just threw in the towel.
Resorted to a shorthand of equations, accompanied
by hair-pulling and other frantic gesticulations.

That’s a lot of stars, of suns–
but still only one, single galaxy,
not an especially distinguished
galaxy at that.

Kind of humbling, isn’t it?
To realize from a cosmic perspective we’re
the equivalent of country bumpkins, living
wayyyy out in the boonies.

And so can any god suffice?
Persuade us of a divine flame
burning invisibly within us, shining
like one of those stars?

Or have you murdered faith,
Galileo, by measuring the glory of
Creation with your heretical gaze,
recanting except in your heart?

 

© Copyright, 2015 Cliff Burns (All Rights Reserved)

“A Personal Cosmology” (prose poems for the spiritually inclined)

Recently, I wrote a series of prose poems to accompany six visual pieces I’d created.

The marriage of words and images worked wonderfully and I’m delighted with the result. I’ve always loved collage, combining text and illos, loved staring at a photo or painting and riffing on it, writing off the top of my head, no pre-planning, just letting ‘er rip. “Automatic writing”, the surrealists used to call it.

Here’s one of the prose poems, just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about (click on the image below to enlarge for reading):

Years ago I composed a series of prose bits* on the back of eight postcards I found, some of them based on famous art works, others historical photographs. Again, all I did was glance at the front, grab a mood or thought, flip the card over and commence scribbling. Worked like a charm (and a cool way to break an intractable writer’s block, hmmm?).

Just a little tip, o fellow suffering wordsmiths.

…and since I’m feeling especially cheerful and generous these days, how about some new music, an ambient number I call “Atmospheric Disturbance”:

  • You can find these “postcard stories” in my Stromata collection, available from my virtual “Bookstore“…or you can order it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.

  • Update, March, 2017: The Oleander Review, a literary journal affiliated with the University of Michigan, has accepted “A Personal Cosmology” for publication in their Spring, 2017 issue.