Mixed Media Voices

"I wanted to go on an immense journey, to travel night and day into the unknown until, forgetting my old self, I came into possession of a new self, one that I might have missed on my previous travels. But the first step was beyond me. I lay in bed, unable to move, pondering, as one does at my age, the ways of melancholy- how it seeps into the spirit, how it disincarnates the will, how it banishes the senses to the chill of twilight, how even the best and worst intentions wither in its keep. I kept staring at the ceiling, then suddenly felt a blast of cold air, and I was gone."

(Mark Strand, Almost Invisible, Alfred A. Knopf, 2012, final poem)

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"I can think of no afterthought. I can only say: here I have been. Music must bleed: let it. It will bleed and bleed into more of itself. It will spontaneously regenerate, nimble as an ice-walking fox in a blasted landscape. It will care for itself. I fall back like an exhausted lover, spent and famished. I am a cactus tree, full and hollow. I am one."

(Adam Fieled, Opera Bufa, Otoliths, 2007, final poem)

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"I might have come from the high country, or maybe the low country, I don't recall which. I might have come from the city, but what city in what country is beyond me. I might have come from the outskirts of a city which others have come or maybe a city from which only I have come. Who's to know? Who's to decide if it rained or the sun was out? Who's to remember? They say things are happening at the border, but nobody knows which border. They talk of a hotel there, where it doesn't matter if you forgot your suitcase, another will be waiting, big enough, and just for you."

(Mark Strand, Almost Invisible, Alfred A. Knopf, 2012)

                                                                 *******

"I was a cadaver in a copse until a cop arrested me. I was a convict in a jumpsuit until I jumped bail. I was a hitchhiker under galactic moon dust until I saw the sun. I was the sun as it rose and I shone on my dead self. I was a copse under the sun. I was a convict and a copse. I was all of this until I learned that you are what you see. I was what I saw until I saw that my eyes were shut. I opened my eyes to a kind of vacancy. I opened my arms to delinquency. I do not see anything now, and it rings."

(Adam Fieled, Opera Bufa, Otoliths, 2007)

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"It was autumn. It was late in the day. A storm was coming. Flocks of birds were flying south. A pink-and-purple sunset stained the house, the wind gusted, branches tossed, leaves dropped like dead moths on a sisal rug. "I'm home," said the husband. "Not again," said the wife."

(Mark Strand, Almost Invisible, Alfred A. Knopf, 2012)

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"There was a girl on a hill. She was shrouded by a wash of shadow. In the background, a steeple peeked through blue. There were clotted sky-arteries. Light was moving on the hill and on the girl. She remained fixed. A sound like thunder made jarring waves. She was facing me. I was floating above a different hill. The picture before me was like a face. The girl knelt where a mouth should've been."

(Adam Fieled, Opera Bufa, Otoliths, 2007)

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American poet Mark Strand is also a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. American poet Adam Fieled is also not a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.