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PORTSIDE CULTURE

CANTUS CUNCTANTUS (SONG OF BEING SLOW TO ACT)  
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Diane Schenker

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_ Poet Diane Schenker offers us a hymn to the subversive potential of
poetry. _

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    "I speak not this to make thee secure and negligent, but to
cheer thee up."
                                             
                           —Robert Burton
If while life is slipping
and the pen and Calliope
are slipping and the word

is a glow-blue square
in darkened rooms
above murky streets—

If I with my sharp spoon
write naked, persistently
outside my purview

flinging my words on the page
scribbling slyly to myself:
    _Words are dancing, dancing.
    Words are meant to dance,
    Words are best so!_

If I choose my verbs, my nouns,
my adverbs, prepositions, commands
outside authority's paid-for bricks—

Who shall say I am not
    the happy enemy
        in the house?

_Diane Schenker is the author of Expert Terrain and the chapbook,
Relation/Couch/Dreaming. Her poems have appeared in The Gettysburg
Review, Rhino, Subtropics, Gargoyle, The Squaw Valley Review,
Writers’ Bloc, SalonZine and VIA. She has written reviews for
coldfrontmag.com and The Boxcar Poetry Review. Diane has also worked
and taught in theater and directed opera. She wrote and staged
Nannerl: A Speculative Morality, a staged inquiry into the life of
Mozart’s older sister._

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INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

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