Poem of the Week

Coltrane's "Venus" and the Ossuaries' tercets

In "Venus" there are two basic elements, the author paces, the horn and the drums. They are working with double-ness; they are working with time. There is one statement at the beginning—the exordium-though this is not the beginning, but the state of things.

And then the instruments proceed to deconstruct the statement in various ways. The drum serves as pacing for the horn, but it has its own investment in this state of things. It holds underneath, but its own project is to also find deconstructions. The drums, played by Rashied Ali, structure the horn and are in turn structured by the horn. Coltrane works on the first declarative syntactical unit. It is not declarative, the clerk interjects, it is provisional, speculative, let us at least try to be as precise as we can since. Fine, says the author, he dissects that speculative, provisional statement, each sound he breaks apart, technically. What is done becomes undone. He also enumerates its emotion. If you listen to it, it is romantic but mourn-ful, sophisticated and worldly; it is elegant. And he pulls these notions apart; he tears the elegance to its limits, he rejects the mournfulness as redundant and he drives the otherworldliness to its outer-worldliness. To my way of seeing, says the clerk, it is more elegant when it is, as you say, torn apart. So both emotionally and structurally, the author continues, ignoring the clerk's interruption (hearing it only as a faint sound at her side), he pulls the statement apart. There's a point in the middle, four or five minutes of it where the project takes hold of him, where the music is fully realized as separate and sentient on its own. There is an uncontrollability to it, and you can hear it wobbling out, out, out, into distances and into a kind of unspeakable. At least in your language, the clerk objects. And then the sound breaks and breaks and breaks. Around that point at about seven minutes the former statement tries to return, to recover itself, to recover the state of things, and it doesn't -so much structural and emotional change has already been accom-plished. "Happened," you mean, says the clerk. So much has "happened," says the author, that the state, the register itself is now indescribable without its fragmentations. It rejects its former self, as well as it accepts that somehow that self like a shadow is embedded in it, in him. And what the drum is doing underneath, at that moment of complete disintegration, the drum sustains. Yet, yet, while the drum is attentive, the drum has disrupted its own dis-course. "Venus" is like two travellers going out to an unknown. Not the unknown, says the clerk, they both have to pay attention, moving toward another, much more lucid, open state of being at the end.

To me, says the author, the tercets are like Rashied Ali's drums, consistent, sheltering, pushing; the three lines are completely steady. Though they never break from being three lines, they show that three lines can perform a range of acts of pacing. The tercet is conducting the ideas— the horn, the Ossuaries. You know nothing about musical structure, the clerk says. But I can hear, the author says. I hear it as rhetoric. Liberatory. Then should I still be here on the dock, says the clerk rhetorically, shouldn't the ship have arrived, shouldn't this shoreline disappear. Instead, I need more burlap, more paper, more boards, more dunnage. More of everything.

The author ignores her again. The bitter-edged-ness, the global violence, one's own violence, the recognitions of one's own vio-lence, the tercet anchors. Anchors, anchors, anchors, the tercet anchors. What colour is an anchor? The plunging clerk comes to catch her breath. What disrupts the tercet is the meaning. It is not regulated by rhyme or equi-metric length of line but by the sense of infinity or possibility, in-betweeness. It is indivisible by anything other than itself and one. The tercet is light, light as well as heavy. It can hold weight, as well as it can be sharp. It could be terse, and it could carry the weight of the ideas, and they could carry surprise. I might use them for a while longer, the author thinks, I don't know.

There isn't a full stop anywhere, they say. The clerk is only trying to get a rise out of the author. But what do you need a full stop for? You have the end of the line. The full stop is irrelevant. A full stop is really not even a point to discuss. Why discuss a full stop when you have a line? A line ends, and that is what that is.

What also happens is expansion and contraction. So, like with "Venus," there is this pursuit of a certain angle of the exordium, and then you go wherever that goes. But if I haven't said this already... You have said it, ad infinitum, mumbles the clerk.. it changes where the line is enjambed, where it calls for attention, where the statement trips along giddily, or where it is full of weight. The tercet has guile. Like the body of a snake. Or on the other hand a triangle, or, less ambitious, the clerk joins, but more cunning, a bit of elastic. I could use a bit of elastic. The next time you come by. I would dye it blue like this paper. Only a snip bit of elastic, the clerk says. I would dye it indanthrene blue. But the author is drifting off.

Yes. And there is a mistake, the clerk says, a typographical one, somewhere there is a mistake. That is, a typo. I have it...But I just think those eight sustained minutes that "Venus" does is just so fantastic. You don't know when it begins, and it ends yes as you say, but it doesn't conclude.