Live performance of "Beethoven Does Not Lie Here"(2003) with Giselle Hillyer (violin), Roger McVey (piano), and Stephen
Bluestone (reader). Text of poem (from The Laughing Monkeys
of Gravity) below.
"BEETHOVEN DOES NOT LIE HERE"
Franz Schubert's last
words
Mornings when he wrote, his
hand flawless
across the page, the night's chat at Bogner's Cafe
or the Anchor Tavern yawned like sleep into the wide
sky;
Vienna danced and sang; the brass bands in the Prater,
the organ-grinders, signed
themselves in voices.
Like the deaf master whom he loved, he raised
the dark indefinite body of sound up from its bones,
its triple-flesh, finishing what Goethe and Schiller
had only begun, turning flat
speech, stiff tropes,
and inadequate rhymes into the poems of poems.
Alpine scores ran through his brain, evenings
of generous accompaniment, and improvised waltzes, too.
He saw wild flowers dance on
a paper field;
carriages crossed the green of his eye; high clouds
bunched in the heavy skies; the chill November rain
still held his quick flammable ear to the flame.
–Stephen Bluestone
"The Business of Words" Stephen Bluestone radio interview (2007), hosted by Collin Kelley.
This interview can also be found at www.leisuretalk.net.
Click on LTRN Archives and go to Business of Words Show #51.
"Baseball, movies, jazz, Rilke–these
are some of the topics in the wide range of topics Stephen
Bluestone addresses in The Flagrant Dead, his marvelous
new collection of brilliant, learned poems. But perhaps the
potential book buyer will imagine that 'brilliant' and 'learned'
mean 'formidable.' Know, then, that Bluestone’s poems are also
life-bearing, love-bearing, gifts for the reader that, as the
advertisement says, are priceless. What other writer would help
us to know that 'There is a world beyond words, or there is
nothing'?"
–Kelly
Cherry
All material copyright
(c) 2018, Stephen Bluestone. All rights reserved.
Please ask permission to use -- unauthorized publication is
a violation of copyright laws.