More Moya Cannon--I am going to a conference at Loras College, which features a presentation on Moya Cannon. The presentation considers "place" in her poetry.

Scríob

Start again from nothing and scrape
since scraping is now part of us;
the sheep's track, the plough's track
are marked into the page,
the pen's scrape cuts a path on the hill.

But today I brought back
three bones of a bird,
eaten before it was hatched
and spat or shat out with its own broken shell
to weather on the north cliffs of Hoy.

This is an edge
where the pen runs dumb.
The small bleached bones of a fulmar or gannet
have nothing to tell.
They have known neither hunger nor flight
and have no understanding of the darkness
which came down and killed.

Tracks run to an end,
sheep get lost in the wet heather.
There are things which can neither be written, nor spoken, nor
read;
thin wing bones which cannot be mended.

Too fragile for scraping,
the bones hold in their emptiness
the genesis of the first blown note.

She has wedded genesis-death in a "coincidence of contraries" (Joyce and the thought of Bruno).

Peggy O'Brien says of Moya Cannon, "She holds and handles indivudual words as though they were fascinating, exotic objects, as in "Thole-Pin," an entire poem about the survival of a word, aptly "thole," "to endure." It is:

Thole-Pin
Who speaks of victory? Endurance is all.
---Rainer Maria Rilke

Words, old tackle

obsolete tools
moulder in outhouses, sheds of the mind---
the horse-collar rots on a high hook;
a flat-iron and an open razor rust together.

Sometimes a word is kept on
at just one task, its hardest,
in the corner of some trade or skill.
Thole survives,
a rough dowel
hammered into a boat's gunnel
to endure---
a pivot
seared between elements.

Nacheinander survives or endures in the "Proteus" episode of Ulysses to be "kept on at just one task" to show how Cannon (and other great poets) puts one word after another so beautifully.

Query: Which subjects are best represented through poetry, and which ones are best represented by painting?

Nacheinander is the German word meaning “One after another.” Nebeneinander is the German word meaning “Side by side.” Stephen is walking on Sandymount strand contemplating the “corrupt” and “uncorrupt” in time and space. The theory demonstrated is that of the German dramatist and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing that Nacheinander represents the subject appropriate to poetry, while Nebeneinander represents the subject appropriate for painting. The following quotation is from the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses.

“Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. You are walking through it howsomever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the Nacheinander. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the Nebeneinander ineluctably! I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the ends of his legs, nebeneinander.”

Chuck