Poem “Listen- Faithful Silence” OTSCP ( On the Spot Collaborative Poem) as part of the Assiduous Dust Podcast Interview with Joshua Corwin

I’m thrilled to share the OTSCP with the esteemed LA-based poet, Joshua Corwin for his series “Assiduous Dust”.

Assiduous Dust is the home of the On-the-Spot Collaborative Poem (OTSCP), a novel form of collaborative poetry where the featured poet and Joshua Corwin take turns in reading out phrases or individual words from lines randomly from their selection of books during the interview. The process of OTSCP promotes other authors’ work in an engaging collaborative bundle of spontaneity. According to Joshua, this technique is a variant of William S. Burroughs’ cut-up method, but combined with exquisite corpse, and grooviness–something he thinks would benefit us all. (Perhaps, he’s right!) 

Adhering to the principle that lineation, indentation, spacing and punctuation are inescapably inseparable from a poem’s content, Joshua compiles the OTSCP and sends it as a ‘party-favor’ to his guest for being on the show–a poetic ‘thank you’ for sharing their words and wisdom with the world.

I was interviewed for Assiduous Dust 11½ (Episode 11½, Season 1 of this intriguing poetry podcast), which will be out in tandem with the LA-based award-winning poet, Mike Sonksen.

MEGHA SOOD BOOKS OUT:

• Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds 
• Kaveh Akbar, Calling a Wolf a Wolf
• Gregory Orr, A Primer for Poets and Readers of Poetry

JOSHUA CORWIN BOOKS OUT:

• Sylvia Plath, Ariel: The Restored Edition, pp. 70-1 (last page of “Letters in November” and “Amnesiac”)

• Hazarat Inayat Khan, The Mysticism of Sound and  Music: The Sufi Teaching of Hazarat Inayat Khan, 1998-99

• Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, pp. 254-55

• Anne Waldman (editor), The Beat Book: Poems &  Fiction from the Beat Generation, pp. 248-49 (Joanne  Kyger, from The Japan and India Journals, 1960–1964)

Here is the Full Poem as the result of the OTSCP 

Listen, Faithful Silence ( Title)

Brilliant dime-size raptures

petaling off him

are dreaming

across my body.

Imagine land, finer. Much finer

Seas who most ably

Unmon Zen.

Kumba Mela Zen.

Escher Zen.

Rooms, spiritless as any prince

Faithful work of drowning.

They will see him

Struggling to be free

gives itself permission…

Red wife, a minute of worms, 

     of another he throws

thinks

life is larger than

a thought

in Sufi terms

no one can

call perception a masterpiece, questioning 

delights

in the picture, into Hardwar.

The sickle from their chest   

Seams   

open themselves to the wild,

now my blood between his ribs

how easily a boy

in a dress

of a youth in porcelain faith.

If words are ism, the fate unasks 

naturally, logically

carried

the Way,

the size 

of old place, 

of the Mind

of stockroom buddhas

for It, a catastrophe of joints

This I kept the housefly

tied to string

tied to a lamp            

as if   

their swords, there is no reward.

What station is the static on?

Something neither I nor you.

Who can say? the curious kōan offers begging.

Offers no journeying

continues automatic.

It continues a breath to the sun,

Turns muwakkals to accomplish gloomy buddhas,

to accomplish this path,

their English hands swimming brahman Jain asanas

Puddles I am soaking in which came

room spiritless, an agile brute

who held the knife is gone.

In the back of his throat, a flash

a white asterisk.

Storm clouds, skies, bursting into sea

like skirts of bruises.

It goes on. We wring a whole universe.

Never dared another color 

off their brother,

nursed grey

deaf-action-water

on the ground.

Open itself to the wild, 

now my blood is drying on the pillow.

This belly full of blades and roots

as if dancing could stop the heart.

Through a drench into scaffolding skies,

storm clouds across my body: a universe.

Guided beginning, shawl lingers, sleeping Shiva.

Says monasteries discussing,

posing Absurd Given

in the spirit of Holism,

in the spirit of Space;

the fluid incomparably   more continuous

than any Kingdom   of Thought.

I do my pillar of fuzz, my damp

Let us.

Listen to me, faithful silence.

Somehow, we’ve become strangers.

A green   life   is blue   death.

A beginning birth,

beginning   universe.

You tear into a body   and come out 

with a fistful of the exact feathers,

seemed cast in lapis and spinning light

inside him   this horse   with 

       this human face   

beneath the sound of his own

But a concrete night stands

bursting with sleep.

Tipped over a New God

Tipped over a New Death

No pervading

only a little barren

One   can   think   about

the pebble of man,

    of wife

    of a sigh,

as four beautiful, blank, logical

    Master

breaks the mind of fields

of fervent buddhas.

The need to comfort anyone else 

to pull the sickle from the chest,

pulling a thorn from the eye of a dog

into hooks

as he twirls his horse-head shadow

on the family.

The only thing that breathes is me.

         Joshua Corwin and Megha Sood © 2020