Dana Levin

APR In the Studio

1. Listening

I was falling asleep, wondering how to describe the poet's studio, when a voice said, "You have to be your own absence, with 50% deity."

--and practice the repertoire of the red candle: turn off all the lights and the music and open the back-door.

woke up with: I false--into arrangement; am out of it--deranged-- 

woke up with: hurry-up is flamboyant and resolutional

woke up with: as the ask progresses to a tiny new yes--

      My friend Dan says: Listen--Record--Orchestrate.

2. Playing

I was telling Dan that sometimes I get directions or lines for a poem by doodling--like how "Isolato with a crown.../Isolato with a barge" came from writing the word ISOLATO and putting a box around it and doodling around the box until one edge of it elongated into a tall thing wearing a crown-looking thing and the whole box looked like that thing on a barge.

He wanted to try it, so I said, "Give me a word." and he said, "Jang Kwon." and I said, "What's that?" and he said, "Heel-palm." and I knew it was a kung fu move--so I wrote JANG KWON and put a box around it and we each started doodling and writing commentary on each others doodling and on each others commentary and did some cutting and here is the poem:

     Jang Kwon (Heel-palm)
     Like a tack, thunder defines the cloud.

     Hand splaying, the fletching of an arrow

     But the technique was not an arrow, 
          hand or foot--
       
     Was not an asking of what was next--:

     The bent cherry
          shedding light above the flat and empty 
          ground.

3. Watching

When the poem begins, a curtain draws back. There is a stage for the mind's Moulin Rouge--

where the image gets its aria--

Pull the curtain: severed foot in a daisied green.
Pull the curtain: anatomical heart: a fortified city.
In the Panopticon, a throat in flames--

The eye swoops back, swoops in.

4. Making

Dream: A test for my Beginning Poetry Workshop: on a page is the barest outline of a fish and the instructions say, "Now draw a more serious fish."

Dream: A poem hangs in the air like a curtain. It dismantles itself until all that remains are single words. They shimmer: nouns and verbs.

                  You must be your own absence, with 50% deity. 
                  
                  You must ask, Why this song, this seeing.

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Dana Levin's first book, In the Surgical Theatre (APR, 1999), recently received the 2003 PEN/Osterweil Award. Her next book, Wedding Day, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. contents | previous | next