I just finished reading that interview with Potter Noster linked to below, and as I wrote in the comment box, the interview itself strikes me as kind of extended prose poem. I enjoyed his take on e.e. cummings and Wallace Stevens in particular, which resonates with a lot of poet converts, I think. Regarding the teenager’s sense of vocation, poets and aeronautical engineers are more or less kind of the same sort of profession, it seems to me. When you squint.

So here is the not-so-anemic Björk singing “The Sun In My Mouth” in a performance from just a few months ago. It’s a great song set to a fantastic poem by e.e. cummings; when I first heard it some ten years ago, the lyrics struck me as remarkably Catholic (“She’s referring to the eucharist!” I said to myself), and certainly the lines “Will i complete the mystery / of my flesh” would seem difficult for any Catholic to read without being reminded of the Corporis Christi Mysticum. Lo, after listening to the Vespertine album a few hundred times and studying up on Björk herself, I had to admit that that for her they were nothing of the kind. Likewise for Cummings. As far as I know. Which, really, isn’t all that much at all. I, for one, will continue to read “silver of the moon” as a metaphor for the semi-circle of the accepted chalice, and hope that neither Cummings nor Björk or even the Corporis Christi Mysticum will mind.

Anyway here’s the poem “I Will Wade Out,” unfortunately without the wonderfully ideosyncratic line breaks so characteristic of cummings:

i will wade out
till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers
I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness
in the sleeping curves of my body
Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery
with chasteness of sea-girls
Will i complete the mystery
of my flesh
I will rise
After a thousand years
lipping
flowers
And set my teeth in the silver of the moon