Dialogue:
Joe Milazzo &
Olof Samuelsson
Joe Milazzo on Olof Samuelsson’s “Elderflowers”
Condensate
Pale as nectar, yet another
bloodletting stems the dusk.
The first night brims with
little points. The second
muddles. When, on the third
night, dreams fall like
pots, winds drown
in limp pearls. To be swathed
in berries, lemons would purl
muslin. Liquor would bend water
until it lies. “Until” being
only a trace of a seam – a fleshy
weft strained warm from
blooms split by dew. And we,
undissolved, our faces
skate some dotted I.
This poem was inspired by the diction employed by Olof Samuelsson in his poem “Elderflowers”.
My first thought was to compose a poem that picked up from where each line of Olof’s poem left off but skewed in a different direction, thus proposing a “warp” to the weft of his meditation on distillation. (And what a distilled vision “Elderflowers” is!) After several attempts, it became apparent to me that the approach I had chosen would only result in a sort of sketchy embroidery, not a patterning that might throw the things about Olof’s poem I most admire into starker relief. Chief among those things being the poem’s language. Rarely in “Elderflowers” do we encounter multisyllabic words or abstract concepts. We are immersed instead in the stuff of crafting elderflower liqueur. (Unless I am led astray by the appearance of liquor in the 12th stanza, followed so shortly by a dream). That is not to day this relatively unadorned language is not capable of surprising us with juxtaposition – “bundled dots” – or texturally rich images such as “foam of pearls.” In fact, such unfamiliarity presented so straightforwardly makes me think of very old recipes (receipts), contiguous as they are with the alchemical and medical arts. The atmosphere may be somewhat mysterious and the outcomes unpredictable, but we are in the presence of those who know what they are doing.
So here I have attempted to compose a poem that follows that impetus and presents it in an even more concentrated form. I constrained myself to couplets, and limited myself (with one or two minor divergences) to using words or variants of words included in Olof’s poem. Thematically, I sought to see how different a poem I might make from these shared materials. Where this labor took me, I found, is where I’d hoped to go to begin with: a shadow poem to “Elderflowers”. And by “shadow poem” I mean one who obscurities are primarily the product of Olof’s illuminations, and one that can lengthen and shrink (and perhaps even disappear into the original poem) depending upon how the readers casts their attention upon it.
Olof Samuelsson on Joe Milazzo’s “Synapsid Elegy”
I think both Joe and I are physical writers. We seem to like the grittiness of certain words, the softness of others. But whereas my poem uses the physical to explore the personal memory of the speaker, Joe uses it to envelop us in an old, forgotten world – a time when language had just begun to break free of its evolved constraints, when the human idiom longed to pass from incantatory desire into something deeper, but was bound by logic and syntax. The poem embodies this perennial, tragic striving for expression: “I’m only wanting… I’m only wanting… I’m only wanting / not repetition”.
He wants a tongue equal to the sulfur-producing bacteria that lie at its root, to find expression worthy of our cellular lineage: “equal / to the inching blast / of its sulfuric / contexture.” Our words must somehow be enough to express both love of and contempt for our bind. To create art is then to reject the monotony of progeny, the robotic reproduction of being, and demand that there is more. We are heaps of bones that were born to swim and one day decided not to. Language is a heap of bones, too. We must therefore also learn to resist its constraints, and move against our epistemological insularity. We can still choose to renounce the waters and live on land, we can choose to stand in awe before the “irised hulls / of a lurid incalculability,” choose to make “the sayer, the saying, / the ear to flash out”. And mourn the innocence we chose to sacrifice in order to bring it to light.
“I’m only wanting / an oar’s vigour” is wonderful. The clarity of a hard pull against thick water, slow and forceful. The poet’s tongue must equal that, ring with low chimes of dead things and far time. Joe also brings forward little explosions and revolutions against the form of being, the “spit”, the “inching blast.” And “to / drape each thud.” That is, to take the merely gravitational and physical lurching of limbs, and make it beautiful. To swathe it in a muslin cloth. Or in a funeral pall.
For each issue, ballast asks pairs of poets to read each other’s work and respond in some way. We hope these dialogues will sound the resonances contained within the issue as well as serve to foster a sense of interconnection and community among our authors.
If you’ve been published in a previous issue of ballast and would like to participate in a dialogue, please reach out to our editors at ballastjournal@gmail.com.