Litanies Said Handedly - Paperback

by Ralph La Charity (Author)

These poems, like certain tattoos get to be tattoos after having had their inceptions as blood echoes descending to the barrens from the bad breath Womb of Vocal, mycelial across America's abundant hide . . . which is to say the open poetry reading, actual home port for the portage the poems in this book proclaim ... my only home, swell-homing in the gloaming everly lasting. This, then, a woefully partial bow to that Harm's Way aural hullabaloo.

Breath neither sees nor does it consent to last. Print lasts as its singular job, soundlessly so. And the vain attempt to simultaneously straddle both the seen and the heard was not in the cards back when Poetry was birthed - back then, printed books like this one weren't even in the picture. And even when printed collections did get into the picture, they did so principally as aids to Memory - which, come to think of it, and prior to the rise of print media, was the specific & profound province of the Poets. Ah but, once memory was usurped by the written, editors became figures of unwonted influence & breath-bound poets ended up as lesser beings. Hence the marginalization of sound itself, the very heartbeat of what Poetry had always been, since the Dawn of Breath's Shaping of the manswarm's speech into Song.

The fact that Poetry is a verb, actively brief in its occasions, is Breath's decree: Print has a wholly other agenda, one under the rule of editorial decree. What determines the value of the Poet's output ? Used to be ears were the judge of that, but, since the rise of print, the eye has gained supremacy - and the eye is where editorial fiat resides, now & since the written made it so, oh so many silent centuries ago.

Ultimately, the work in this book mustneeds be heard by its Poet to be believed . . .

This book is richly illustrated with color collages by the author.