Five Points, Vol. 18 No. 1
Spring 2017From Mark Jarman: "I suppose a painting, a hummingbird, a kestrel, or a cormorant, as I approached any of them, is an object for meditation and an occasion for making a poem that will put the meditation into words."
Sample Content
Mark Jarman
Norman O. Brown. The Cantos. Santa Cruz, 1972
Stemwinder, spellbinder of text and pretext,
who lectured with a pop top on his index finger,
as if the emperor of Soda Pop
had bestowed it.
Reading the Greek, the Chinese, the Latin, the American,
and gliding dancelike through the dance
of gliding anaphora as if sense were all
in the music.
Sense was all in the music—in the lecture hall.
I had sneaked in to hear him, to watch him
twist like a Brancusi among the bracken of language,
baroque as ground fog.
And catch himself on a spine of incoherence
as Pound had been caught, time and again.
Both of them told us, “The grove needs an altar.”
And so it did.