Poet Forrest Gander has created a poetry remix piece called “Bey The Light.” The words were sourced from an interview that diva Beyoncé gave to Dominic Teja Sidhu and Christopher Bartley.
The piece is featured in the recently released issue of CR Fashion Book alongside a photo spread. Beyoncé (pictured, via) did not know that her interview responses would be constructed into a poem. Follow this link to read the full poem.
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I'll stop work mid-afternoon today, hop a train, and head to the Philadelphia Flower Show (but before the Flower Show, Tweed, says my friend Jan Suzanne, after the Show, tapas—that's my Jan Suzanne). I'm charging both cameras. I'm surveying my comfortable shoes. And I'm recalling this quote from Forrest Gander, which I shared with you once, years ago:
“Maybe the best we can do is leave ourselves unprotected.... To approach each other and the world with as much vulnerability as we can possibly sustain.”
I have opened myself to the possibility of amazement. I will return with images for you.
It was a movie weekend—"Slumdog Millionaire" at ten on Friday night, "Frost/Nixon" at 4:15 Sunday, "Mongol," courtesy of Netflix, in between, late Saturday afternoon. And then the Oscars, a tradition strong as Christmas here—a semi-glamorous meal delivered picnic style while the "barely mint" dresses float by. The Oscars always make me cry. Call me a sentimental fool (you won't be the first), but I like seeing dreams fulfilled. I like the idea that it's possible.
In between, I was walking about my humble abode feeling knocked-down grateful for all the book recommendations that came my way via Looking for Book Love, for all the passion that is out there, still, for stories that cling to the page. While I considered the titles that came in, I read essays on writing and craft—re-read them, I should say, in preparation for Tuesday, when I'll spend a chunk of the day in a coffee shop with aspiring young writers. Sven Birkerts, Natalia Ginzburg, Mary Oliver, Jack Gilbert, Gerald Stern, Stanley Kunitz, Forrest Gander, and of course Pablo Neruda will keep me and the girls company throughout a day that will also be spent collecting and sorting the details we hunt down with our cameras.
We'll yield to six exercises, which I've named the following way. I plan to write right alongside the girls, for I am not the sort of writer who believes she definitively knows. I'm the sort who keeps trying to find out. Who learns as she teaches, and as she goes.
The class in brief (should you wish to write along...):
Leveraging Involuntary Memory
The Perceiving I
The Hunt for Character
The Fair Release of Story
The Act of Autobiography
Vulnerable Fictions
At four a.m. reading Forrest Gander's As a Friend. Like Carol Maso's Ava only a harder strike against the heart. The brutality of it. A liar's life yielding the purest chords of truth. Fractures and fragments (for that is how this story is told—in fractures and fragments) suggesting the whole mesmerizing ruinous sack of the universe. "To be consequent to those around me." That's what the brilliant, profane hero of this story wants. To accept our own vulnerability. That's his prayer:
Maybe the best we can do is try to leave ourselves unprotected. To keep brushing off habits, how we see things and what we expect, as they crust around us. Brushing the green flies of the usual off the tablecloth. To pay attention.... To approach each other and the world with as much vulnerability as we can possibly sustain. To open out. With all our mind and body and imagination, to keep opening out.
Like I said. As a poet. As a friend.
What a stunning picture and equally stunning quote.
I find what writing asks of me terrifies me almost daily. But I return to it again and again
Gorgeous photo.