Vincent Zepp on Nathan Leshley’s “Ballad of Leipsig”

We could begin by quoting wiki-

This is about the composer. For the painter, see Johann Sebastian Bach (painter). For the TV series, see Johann Sebastian Bach (TV series). “Bach” redirects here. For other uses, see Bach (disambiguation).

Not sure dure if disambiguation is the is path for our dialog. I find tergiversation to be more apt for such an adventure.

A poem leads us willingly to buying the ticket and taking the ride. Basho’s Back Roads To Far Places or Ferlinghetti’s Coney Island Of The Mind. I listened to Little Fugue in G minor which I hadn’t before. Played by the Netherlands Bach Society. I’m in love with the Netherlands. Love pipe organs ever since I sang Gregorian chant. Furthering I discovered a fugue is also a state or period of loss of awareness of one’s identity, often coupled with flight from one’s usual environment. That can’t be all bad.

Poetry is a very plastic medium. In the sense of being malleable. When you hear Bach do think how can I do that in a poem. How can a poem be imbued with the music and magic without resulting in a faux fugue and poem. At the same time not putting the poem in a period costume. Understanding the infinite and incorporeal nature of creativity. Being malleable means you can whack and hammer the language to get to the gold. You avoided the cliches of musicology and ladled into the broth of Bach’s frequencies. It is the frequencies that are transmitted – the language of I- as Joel Goldsmith might say.

In the Van Gogh Museum my mind was melting at the thick applications of paint that Vincent used on some of his works and how those glops created a deeper touching of our two minds. That’s what’s meant by the frequencies-that coming together of minds. We say ‘I was moved by the painting’ or I was touched by that song’. We don’t move or touch but are moved and touched by the mind that still lives in true works of art.

So I wondered how could I apply thick glops of paint in my poems. The way to use impasto-glops of paint-was through language.

Don’t know if the alligator poem is getting published but I loved the lines:
flocculent
pulvillio
of the
deipnosophists
sialoquence

If you allow the words to swill around inside your mouth you can feel the textures of the language on your tongue and filling your mouth. So much better an experience than saying the tufts of powdery saliva coming out of the dinner guests’ mouth while speaking - avoiding the pedestrianess of prose.

Buy the ticket take the ride. These poems are a trip

Ps- there were 2 kind of fools…. licensed fools and
natural fools.