The Sound Ecologist - Issue Number 1

DAMSELFLIES, POETS, AND (DE)COMPOSITION

LOCAL ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: ROB FUNKHOUSER SCORE SAMPLER: MEZZANINE ECHOES

AUGUST 2024 ISSUE NUMBER 1

HIDDEN COMPOSERS: THE MUSIC OF EZRA POUND

The Sound Ecologist chronicling local composition and decomposition

The Sound Ecologist EDITOR-IN-CHIEF BRENNA GREEN

MANAGING EDITOR CHARISSA GARRIGUS

CONTENT DIRECTOR LUKE GARRIGUS PHOTOGRAPHERS GEORGE REVILL LUKE GARRIGUS BRENNA GREEN

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS BETHANY CATLIN-JOHNSON BRENNA GREEN CHARISSA GARRIGUS GRACE CATLIN LUKE GARRIGUS ROB FUNKHOUSER

PHOTOGRAPHY BY GEORGE REVILL COVER ILLUSTRATION BY AARON GREEN

OUR CONTRIBUTORS LUKE GARRIGUS Composer, pro-wrestling fan, President of Sound Ecologies

CHARISSA GARRIGUS Pianist, deathnomusicologist, Vice President of Sound Ecologies THE SOUND ECOLOGIST MAGAZINE IS A PUBLICATION OF SOUND ECOLOGIES, INC. WWW.SOUNDECOLOGIES.ORG 01

BRENNA GREEN Pianist, composer, educator, houseplant rehabilitation hopeful

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LOCAL MUSICIAN FEATURE

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Rob Funkhouser HIDDEN COMPOSERS

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Vorticist poet Ezra Pound: Composer of troubadour songs, operas SAMPLER

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Mezzanine Echoes - Brenna Green

SPECIES COUNTERPOINT

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highlights of native v. invasive species POEMS BY FRIENDS Bethany Caitlin-Johnson, Grace Catlin

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PHOTOGRAPHY BY GEORGE REVILL

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Dear Reader, What a stroke of fortune that The Sound Ecologist has snagged your eye and you’re willing to read more.

Sound Ecologies, as a non-profit organization, has utilized music and the arts to specifically benefit environmental conservation and social causes. In the same vein, The Sound Ecologist magazine endeavors to bring together all the cyclical components of local music and nature.

In addition to our concerts, we have created this publication to further a sense of musical community with like-minded creatives and conservationists in Indianapolis. You can view the calendar for our upcoming 2024 season at the back page of this issue; feel free to detach it and post it up on your refrigerator, on a local street corner, or if you feel the impending doom of environmental disaster weighing down on us all like the sword of Damocles and want to do something good with this bit of paper once these concerts are a thing of the past — hot water, salt, and glue will be your guide into a wonderful afternoon of papier-mache art.

Sustainably yours,

BRENNA GREEN, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

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LOCAL MUSICIAN SPOTLIGHT: INDY DENIZEN ROB FUNKHOUSER

Funkhouser performs on his Glass Organ in St. Louis.

LOCAL MUSICIAN SPOTLIGHT: ROB FUNKHOUSER Sound Ecologies president Luke Garrigus engages in a discussion with local artist and mad scientist of sound, Rob Funkhouser.

Luke Garrigus: Where are you from? Where are you currently located?

Rob Funkhouser: I grew up in Richmond, IN, and currently reside in the Garfield Park neighborhood of Indianapolis.

LG: How do you approach creating art? What is your process like?

RF: My process tends to be equal parts quiet reflection, and chaotic bag grabbing. Once a piece is in development, it tends to be a lot of patient chipping away at things and getting rid of unnecessary elements. But up until that part starts, every piece tends to start as a series of scribbles, random streams of midi notes, a general idea of a "vibe" and a series of prayers, reflections, and "I can't believe I'm this LATE"s. I am a true believer that the blank page is the devil's playground and anything you can do to avoid it will keep you on the straight and narrow. To this end, I like to compose on music boxes, in synthesizer programs, and in text before I ever touch the notation program.

BY LUKE GARRIGUS PHOTOGRAPHY BY TED SOMERVILLE

LG: What are some of your prominent musical influences?

RF: I was a musical omnivore from highschool onward. Some of the influences that come to mind right now are George Crumb, Miles Davis, The Drift, Max Roach, Javanese Gamelan Music, Tarentel, Olivier Messiaen, Sarah Davachi, Aphex Twin, An Albatross, Refused, Wilco, Tim Hecker, and Steve Reich.

LG: Describe your music in three words?

RF: Composed under duress (I'm often a terrible procrastinator.)

LG: Where do you find inspiration?

RF: I find inspiration in learning, building, and in the work itself. While there might be many motivations for why I might set out to create a physical work or write a new piece of music, the single deepest well of inspiration and motivation is in the creation of music itself. Each time I sit down to work on a new piece, I find something new to fall in love with, even when a given work might be limited by time/circumstance/skill level, the possibilities are endless.

This is doubly true when I'm working on pieces built around a unique thread of my performance practice such as the glass organ, or electric tuning forks, where the performative gestures that come from learning those instruments will influence compositional ideas, and vice versa.

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INDY DENIZEN ROB FUNKHOUSER LG: Is there a particular favorite piece or piece that means a lot to you?

RF: The world of music is so wide and varied and vibrant that it is next to impossible for me to pick a favorite, but a few works that made me think "you can make music like THIS?!?!?!" are Tim Hecker's Ravedeath 1972, George Crumb's Black Angels, Tarentel's Ghetto Beats on the Surface of the Sun, Holly Herndon's Platform, Dan Trueman's Neither Anvil nor Pulley, Paula Matthusen's Old Fires Burn Old Buildings, and Catherine Lamb's Prisma

LG: Piece of advice for younger composers?

RF: If you want this to be a primary activity in your life, then do your best to make your own sacred space. What that might look like can vary from person to person, it can be pencil and paper and piano, it can be a crowded coffee shop and a too-small table, it can be a park, it can be an airport, but the main thing is to find it and make sure you allow yourself to be devoted. Try to find the part of yourself that wants to dive into creative work, and submit to it regularly and without reservation. Also, make sure you give yourself breaks from being the boss. Set a goal and accomplish it, while taking a vacation from asking why. Also take every opportunity you can afford to hear new (to you) music and learn more about the world. GET GOOD EARPLUGS AND WEAR THEM REGULARLY.

LG: Best memory of a performance?

RF: My masters recital and the premier of Reflect and Release are both up there as favorites, because they ended up bringing people from different spheres of my life together in new ways.

There's always something special about coming out of a long period of isolation and bringing something out into the world with your loved ones close by. Both of those performances were sources of great hope and joy for me.

LG: Worst memory of a performance?

RF: Ok I don't want to throw anyone under the bus on this, but I was on a study abroad trip somewhere in Europe, and a group of us were supposed to have our pieces performed by a woodwind quintet. In the course of the first week, a professor from another school had told the quintet that our pieces were only for a "casual reading session", and so they didn't rehearse these pieces that we had been working on all semester. Now for me, I had written a fairly easy piece after being burned on some early performances, but for others it was a total disaster.

On top of this, I was recovering from a near-death respiratory infection and could only speak in a soft whisper like three syllables at a time. I was pretty familiar with the other pieces on the session, and had identified a lot of pain points, but couldn't work through them with the ensemble because I couldn't speak. So I just had to sit there and helplessly watch these other composers get their pieces butchered.

It ended up being alright though, after the misunderstanding was cleared up, the ensemble gave everyone a nice recording after the festival to use on their future applications.

LG: Favorite piece of music you've written?

RF: Of the last year or so, I would say either Lunar Light Pollution or Iris Field.

LG: Why do you write music?

RF: If I'm being totally honest, I write music because it feels like the thing I was called to do. Where, even in the most disorienting strugglebound moments, I am heading in the direction of self-discovery and becoming a more open, honest, generous version of myself. I also hope to help people experience the perpetual beauty of life in the way I do. Especially today, when our ears are regularly assaulted by droll, thoughtless sounds, I find it imperative to keep the window to beauty open through music. It is unlike any other artform in its ability to both obliterate and reaffirm our deepest notions of self and who we are as beings in time.

It's this connection to the core of humanity that I feel keeps me going, even when it seems pointless.

LG: What is currently inspiring you?

RF: Right now I am inspired by the field of projects that I have underway in a few different creative threads. I am writing a lot of chamber music this year while also working on some larger installations, and it is forcing me to maintain perspectives both large and small across multiple projects. I am really digging long, unfolding gestures, as well as tiny crinkly ones.

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Eastern Washington, Where Lunar Light Pollution was composed.

GIVING THE IVORY TOWER A YARD BUILDING MUSICAL CULTURE THROUGH SHARED EXPERIENCE

BY ROB FUNKHOUSER PHOTOGRAPHY BY LUKE GARRIGUS

In many ways, the mythical descent of a composer from their ivory tower with a score in-hand, documenting some musical epiphany, is waning in favor of a more collaborative model of musical creation that brings the status of composer back down to the plane of other mortal musicians. In many cases, commissions are being treated more as a way to support intentional collaborative relationships rather than funding a transaction of score for money. But even with this model, composers can end up ensnared in an individualistic cycle, island-hopping between collaborative projects, funding sources, and communities. There have been times in my life where talking to my peers seems like a meeting of a group of nation states on neutral bureaucratic grounds, rather than a conversation between artists in the same field. For many composers, the art form itself can feel like hopping from one field to another, as we put on a bevy of hats in the name of getting work made and finding our audiences. The questions that lead us to compose music can also very easily slip from reflection to rumination.

In this article, I will lay out strategies (some obvious, some maybe less so) that I have used to remain grounded in community as I have developed my practice as a composer and performer.

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Perform with other people - This one may seem obvious, but it is worth saying out loud. For 99% of composers, performing with others in some fashion will keep you grounded in your community, and in the lived experience of playing music. Composition can be one of the most vulnerable experiences of self-discovery, especially when a given project allows you to get to the core of what you find beautiful and interesting in music. This process of inquiry can take us far afield from the reality of music-making, replacing it with a process of nail-biting as we wait to see how well the piece will do. Playing music with others, especially music that is not your own, can keep you more grounded and empathetic in your musical pursuits. Playing with others is also the easiest way to begin building a space for musical community and dialogue.

Take opportunities that de-center yourself - Classical composition is often a practice carried out in solitude, which can lead us to lose sight of the power music has outside of traditional concert presentation. Taking opportunities outside of this cycle will not only make you a better composer, but will open your perspective to different ways of working. If able, write for theater or dance productions, or anything where you are just one cog in a larger creative machine.

Go to a ton of concerts - Again, this one might be a bit obvious, but it bears saying. Take the time to go to concerts other than your own, and do so without a specific agenda. Keeping your ears open to other artists is essential for remaining humble, and feeling connected to the artistic community around you. Concerts are also an excellent place to network, but remember to let people have their moments. If you feel you have a connection that could lead to a project, follow up after the event.

Become a voracious listener - At this point, it might seem that I am just exercising my ability to list obvious things, this one is important. Overcoming the naive belief that listening to too much music will somehow pollute your own musical voice can be an important step in maturing as an artist. To be sure, fetishizing variety can have it’s own pitfalls, but, on the whole, listening to as much music as you can will often inspire more than it will limit. We stand on the shoulders of giants, but only if we look down and realize that boulder is a deltoid.

Seek places where resources are shared - I spent much of my twenties more or less diy-or-die in many aspects of my craft. This had the benefit of forcing me to learn a lot of skills both directly and indirectly related to getting projects across the finish line, but also spread my interests to wide at times. I reached a middle ground when I started working with other people that could bring resources to the table. Working with a group can allow you to expand your skills based on the needs of the project, while also staying free to concentrate on your specific role as a composer.

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MAKE IT NEW: THE MUSICAL PONDERINGS OF EZRA POUND

BY BRENNA GREEN

“Make it new” was the adopted slogan of Ezra Pound - he disliked the decadent, flabby, repetitive poetry emanating from England at the time- his intent was to pare it all down to everything that is spare, precise, and dry, propelled by a clear imagery of words. Pound’s use of brevity was influenced by haiku traditions of Japan. And as a student of the traditions of Noh theatre, he incorporated the austere style and distinctive character in his works.

Pound was one of the earliest proponents of both the Imagism and Vorticism movements, yet he was known to originate many “groups” and abandon them with the same frequency. His musical career enmeshed into both artistic movements. Pound’s life leads us to consider the role of the poet in the world, and the extent to which poets are considered political figures. Certainly his own political bent alienated him from the general public’s good graces.

Pound promoted his fellow poets in their careers, including such forces as Gertrude Stein and James Joyce. As Joyce wrote to poet William Butler Yeats: "I can never thank you enough for having brought me into relation with your friend Ezra Pound who is indeed a miracle worker." Hemingway, although opposing in political ideals, maintained that “Ezra was the most generous writer I have ever known and the most disinterested. He helped poets, painters, sculptors and prose writers that he believed in and he would help anyone whether he believed in them or not if they were in trouble” (Carpenter, 226). In 1908, Pound moved to England to bask in the glow of who he thought was the greatest living poet - Yeats.

While there, he situated himself in the London literary avant-garde circles.

In imitation of various avant-garde movements, Pound invented the term “Imagisme.” The basic tenets of this movement included an emphasis on clarity, directness, and a lack of unnecessary verbiage. In poetry, Imagism functions like a successive series of vignettes to create a larger picture. Pound laid down three Imagist rules in the 1913 issue of Poetry magazine; namely:

1. Direct treatment of the "thing", whether subjective or objective.

2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome. [21]

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Pound later expanded on these rules by publishing an Imagist manifesto, structured on what to do and what not to do, for those wanting to write in the Imagist style.

A FEW DON’TS: “An “Image” is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. I use the term “complex” rather in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart, though we may not agree absolutely in our application.

It is the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.

It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.

All this, however, some may consider open to debate.

The immediate necessity is to tabulate A LIST OF DON’TS for those beginning to write verses. I can not put all of them into Mosaic negative.

To begin with, consider the three propositions (demanding direct treatment, economy of words, and the sequence of the musical phrase), not as dogma— never consider anything as dogma—but as the result of long contemplation, which, even if it is some one else’s contemplation, may be worth consideration.”

“If you are using a symmetrical form, don’t put in what you want to say and then fill up the remaining vacuums with slush.“ Pound‘s Imagist manifesto

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Ezra Pound and violinist/collaborator Olga Rudge, Venice, 1923. (Olga Rudge Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.)

It was during these Imagist years that Pound published his striking poem on the fleeting nature of human life, reminiscent of a haiku, “In A Station of the Metro.”If you contrast this brief poem with another of Pound’s poetic works, the juxtaposition is almost comical in regards to difference of size.

Pound’s lifelong project was the Cantos, having worked on it on and off for over 50 years. Some consider it to be the most complex and challenging collection of poems of the 20th century. At 800 pages, it attempted to be a cursory collage of all the poetic traditions in the world - quite the undertaking. While Pound described it as an epic including history, The Times called it a great improvisation rather than a poem.

Pound unexpectedly broke from the Imagist movement and contrived a new set of artistic beliefs with his friend, the artist/writer/critic Wyndham Lewis. The movement was called Vorticism, and suffered a shortlived fate. In his 1913 essay on Vorticism, Pound quotes the 19th-century English literary critic Walter Pater: “[A]ll arts should approach the conditions of music.”

He coined the term Vorticism and effectively transformed his earlier imagism principles by adding a new emphasis on movement: “The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing.”

Pound and Lewis collaborated on the first issue of the journal BLAST, published less than a month before the outbreak of the First World War.

POUND & ANTHEIL 1924 was an eventful music year for Pound: he wrote several essays on music, one centering on the composer George Antheil (his friend).

Pound had a close collaborative relationship with Antheil.

“Strawinsky's [sic] merit lies very largely in taking hard bits of rhythm, and noting them with great care. Antheil continues this.”

“Antheil is supremely sensitive to the existence of music in time-space.” Another treatise figured on a discussion on harmony (where he concentrates on the element of time combined with harmony, since he was a poet and had a natural concern and feeling for rhythm.) It is surprisingly entertaining to read, filled with quips about certain unquestioned traditions of music theory. I want to share a paragraph from it, about melody as it relates to harmony.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; petals, on a wet black bough. - “In A Station of the Metro,“ Ezra Pound, 1913

“When Harmony was alive it was merely a personal giveaway, it was a bundle of tricks of the trade, the fruit of personal experience, it was a way of getting over a difficulty or managing a turn of expression; it wasn't intended to cramp anyone's style: It was pragmatic, it worked, and each school worked its trade secrets to death with the magnificence of Bel Canto, of music up to Johann Sebastien. The mechanism was a plus thing, it worked in an open field. The mess came when it was set up as a fence, and everyone tried to walk on the rails or climb over it. They rotted their melodies by trying to find schemes which "harmonize" according to a concept of ‘harmony’ in which the tendency to lifelessness was inherent.” (On Harmony, pp 18-9) W. W. Hoffa expounds on the musical collaboration of Ezra Pound and George Antheil through the lens of the Vorticism movement, as follows: “It is also true that T.S. Eliot’s success was secure by 1923 and Pound was probably looking elsewhere for someone in need of his polemical skills. Antheil’s experiments he saw, moreover, as a parallel to those he had himself been urging in poetry; a reaction against the listless “impressionism” of post-romantic “rhetoric.” In musical terms, this meant a rejection of both Wagner and Debussy: “Wagner, a great musician, in his manner of greatness, produced a sort of pea soup,... Debussy distilled it into a heavy mist, which the post-Debussians have desiccated into a diaphanous dust cloud.”

Another shared fascination that drew Pound and Antheil in sympatico is rhythm, of a complex; exact sort, the way in which time evolves an event. Going back to the aesthetic movements of Imagism and Vorticism: in 1917, Pound determined that the most salient facet of poetry was the “image,” it was only the “moving image” which, to him, could capture the pulse of life; thus the element of time must enter poetry if the long major philosophical poem was to be written. In Pound’s head, the Imagist poems had their parallel in the over-refined impressionism of the piano works of Debussy. Vorticism, according to Pound, was a “correlated aesthetic which carries you through all arts.” The relevant quality of music was rhythm, not the evocation and representation of a literary mood. Thus the “new music” he sought had to be rhythmically-based and had to have “edge” and “precision.”

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MUSICAL WORKS Most of Pound’s music is predominantly monophonic with sparse harmonies. He seems to have intertwined his dislike of over-describing ideas in his poetry/prose with his repugnance of a dependence on harmony to carry a musical work. Much like his poetic ideals, Pound believed that music should not be sentimental and that melody alone should not be relied upon, and specified that “the element most grossly omitted from treatises on harmony up to the present is the element of TIME. The question of the time-interval that must elapse between one sound and another if the two sounds are to produce a pleasing consonance or an interesting relation, has been avoided” (Harmony, 9).

In 1923, a year after the publication of The Waste Land and Ulysses, and at the high point of the modernist movement that he did so much to mold into its present state, Ezra Pound completed the stage version of his opera Le Testament de Villon. The life story of the 15th-century poet François Villon – a latemedieval rapscallion – appealed to Pound during his search for a libretto, and conveniently enough Villon, in his 1461 collection Le Testament, offered sufficient material through written confessions of the run-ins he had with the Paris police and his troubles with the Church. Le Testament was finally restaged after its 1920s BBC Radio premiere, but only a year before Pound’s death. Le Testament de Villon, termed by Richard Taruskin as “a modernist triumph,” solidified the poet’s “claim to musical immortality.” The use of micro-rhythms and irregular bar lengths is an attempt to capture Villon’s idiomatic Old French. “Pound’s reasons for composing music differ from the usual reasons to compose. He sought to revive the troubadour art of ‘motz el son’ - ‘word and sound’ - through a recombination of words and music that would recover and transmit the voice, rhythm, and mind of the author over the voice of the composer or the performer. The persons most capable of determining whether Pound has succeeded have yet to come forward” (Fisher, 5).

Likely stemming from his collaboration with Olga Rudge, Pound composed a collection of short violin and fiddle tunes that show a marked similarity to his poetic rhyme schemes. Pound’s final and most melodicallythoughtful work for solo violin, “Al Poco Giorno”, is based upon the rhythms and the sestina structure of Dante Alighieri ’s Al poco giorno [To the short day]. The violin work can be interpreted as a quasi-translation, with the music emanating loosely from word rhythms, while still being recognizable as a free partsetting of words to music. The flighty, florid patterns in this late work take a decided detour from the composer’s earlier penchant of assigning one syllable per pitch. Pound drew a correlation between the individual lines of the poem and its respective bar of music - indicated the line numbers to which the music corresponds in each sestet in the Pound by E. O. Hoppé on the cover of Pavannes and Divisions (1918) left margin of his score. His musical sestina is structured by means of the “melodicle,” a musical device able to be utilized forward, backward, and in retrograde.

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Ezra Pound (1968). “Literary Essays of Ezra Pound”, p. 437, New Directions Publishing

Sources: Carpenter, Humphrey. A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound, 1988. Faber and Faber.

Fisher, Margaret. “The Music of Ezra Pound.” The Yale University Library Gazette 80, no. 3/4 (2006): 139–60. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40859548.

Pound, Ezra. Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony: With Supplementary Notes. P. Covici: 1927.

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Mezzanine Echoes Brenna Green

Andantino 86

5

with pedal

rit.

9

13

Copyright © 2022 by Brenna Green.

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17

21

Adagio

25

rit.

29

cantabile

14

33

37

41

45

accel. rit.

15

49

Tempo I

53

57

61

16

65

69

Meno mosso

74

rit.

77

freely

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Species Counterpoint

ECOLOGICAL REPORT BY CHARISSA GARRIGUS

SKIMMING BLUET - PHOTOGRAPHY BY LUKE GARRIGUS

Skimming Bluet Enallagma geminatum Ever seen a gorgeous, blue dragonfly that seems rather thin? Chances are, you’ve actually spotted a damselfly! Often mistaken for dragonflies, damselflies exhibit two pairs of wings and almost twig-like abdomens. They are usually a striking shade of blue or emerald, sometimes contrasting with dark black wings. The lifecycle of these interesting creatures presents some notable points. Instead of experiencing a three-stage cycle, damselflies mature quickly. They bypass a pupal stage entirely, moving straight from larva into adults. Imagine going from childhood to adulthood, with no teenage years at all!

Just like humans, damselflies grow at different rates. Some species are slower to mature, and can take a year or more to fully reach their adult state. Other species go through these changes within the span of weeks. The same is true for emergence and flight: depending on species and egg-laying tendencies, some varieties of damselfly emerge gradually during a season and some appear all at once.

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Species Counterpoint, continued.

Damselfly Life Cycle Damselflies lay their eggs in water, often on plants growing either on the shoreline or shallows. Indeed, many females will actually lay their eggs on the parts of the plants growing under the waterline. This can help keep the eggs warm over the wintertime, though many species of damselfly hatch fairly quickly. Upon hatching the damselfly enters the nymph stage–a larval period wherein the baby damselfly stays bound to its aquatic environment.

These nymphs live at the bottom (or substrate) of the pond or river where they were born, keeping underneath plants and sometimes staying the winter there.

They do eat other small creatures and capture food quickly by way of an elongated lower jaw. Damselfly nymphs are able to both swim and breathe through their gills. As they grow, nymphs molt–shedding their firmer exoskeletons in a process called instar. These nymphs will often go through 10-12 instars until they are fully grown. When they are finally fully developed, the damselfly nymph will exit the water in order to shed its final exoskeleton and energy as an adult.

Life Cycle - illustration by Zoe Catlin

Sources: Purdue College of Agriculture: https://extension.entm.purdue.edu/4h/default.php?page=46 The Field Museum: https://fieldguides.fieldmuseum.org/sites/default/files/rapid-color-guidespdfs/388_0.pdf

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Poems By Friends A SONATA I THOUGHT ABOUT YOU POEM BY BETHANY CATLIN-JOHNSON This one suggests I love you like this: spaced out to you during some piano sonata last Sunday—a long one, Beethoven— In the program notes: “Beethoven (sonata-formed Kant up to and until the star-studded vault) is primarily about love.”

He really smashes this one note keeps twisting his wrist up to it because that is all that this is: I wrote in my notebook: repetition (there is a paper coming due soon on love or its forms) And this poem is not in sonata form because of this stanza. Because of the on and on note did not say love it said time, more and all of it, going on moving out yet here an hour, maybe more a sonata or just a song to keep on because Photography by George Revill

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FROG SONGS POEMS BY GRACE CATLIN I. To the little beast squirming and fragile in my grip a human’s hands are a weapon.

They mean an end much bigger than death to a creature who can’t comprehend abstraction.

I washed my hands to protect him from sunscreen— his skin is as delicate as his bones which, it strikes me, monstrously, I could break if I only closed my fingers.

There isn’t anything holy in the kindness that stays my hand— it’s purely human.

This frog can only glimpse a fraction of me—all he sees is grasping hands. He can’t see my eyes or understand that all I want is to hold him for a moment to rescue him from the inside of the house.

It would be so simple to crush him but I can treat him tenderly too and sometimes the harder thing— gentleness— is also the easier one.

PHOTOGRAPHY BY LUKE GARRIGUS

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II. Frogs are such fragile beasts wet silk for skin, permeable to all our chemicals, vile and benign.

But the capacity a frog holds for violence is incredible. To some frogs kindness is a foreigner. A woman holds out her finger and a frog does his level best to rend and tear— unfortunately he lacks teeth. The failure of his gummy mouth to draw blood only further enrages him. She stands there and takes it all and loves him builds him a home in her home checks the humidity and water quality and buys him a balanced variety of food.

My favorite thing about being human is the ability to set aside pain and carry on— meticulous care for things that try and try to hurt us.

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