Upon Reading Flavia Cosma's Thus Spoke The Sea

I

Like theologians of flames and bones,
We all read literature badly:
We think it is practical scripture,
And we have heard it, moaning, dying,
In a professor's suffocating briefcase:
All the love poems shrivelling into elegies:

We league together and laugh out loud:
"Here is another poem that doesn't quite work.
See: the light it should bring is broken like water."
We diagnose the diseased morals,
The Vichy-chic, Vichy-vicious, Vichy-vitiated visions
Of politically evil bards,
And all their fossilized, fustian, fussed over poetry,
Whose lines, once elastic with music,
Are long gone crusty, clunky, leaden,
And decayed into dissertations
To hobble bel canto with cant-
Contraband gibberish...

Espy all those rickety typists at old typewriters!
Those maimed, vengeful creatures,
Whose grace is pure sludge:
May we credit their heart-felt plagiarisms
With a hitherto, neglected excellence?
Cops alone decipher and then dissect their texts -
Each accurate sham,
Each purveyor of perverted originality:
Dilapidated syllables,
Clacking critiques,
Drugged murmurs.

Witness: The Canuck poets who are dead,
The damnable British poets,
and the vulgar Yankee poets
Say nothing-
Only their mistakes are beautiful.

(They thought they were making art,
But they were just making out.)

The sun brands us with this history,
As strong and incinerating as lava:
Drowsy, crumbling grammar,
An airless language best printed as equations,
Plus bloated dictionaries,
Suppurating with uselessly ambiguous terms.

We can't be blamed for thinking,
"Throat slit, skull smashed in: The Muse is finished.
Comatose, the outdated heretic
Gasps on in folklore, ransacked diaries-
The repercussions of singing."

We wonder, "Was it Verlaine who rejected
Rimbaud with ague,

Causing that ultimate priest to shimmer, finally,
As beautiful and gaudy as a saviour?

Well, put down all those old books.
A poet is only useful as a poet.

II

Ink is smoky water-scribbler liquor-
Unless we apply the tyrannical discipline of Beauty,
To paint Pain in thoroughly painful words,
So language cracks like lightning.
In true poetry, ink must bleed.

Our satisfaction is faction-
Violent song and perfidious, savage ink-
Not confection, not mere fiction.

Ogle insect jewels sparkling in fruit pulp and juice-
Mimicking Sade partisans screwing in rooms
Maggoted by shadows, some crude, boisterous,
The libertine sun blithely urging them on:
Like these vicious virgins, copulating,
And furious with liquour- the poet
Indulges her culture, sucks its nectar,
Luxuriates, riots lushly, in rot,
Wasting everything to glittering waste,
To gild her hosts with gems divined from garbage.

III

Attend now, Flavia Cosma-
Too earthy for atmospherics,
Too spiritual for prisons:
She knows Eden is a bestial Utopia.

And being originally Romanian-
A once-citizen of Ovid's ex-state of exile,
She knows Ovid is eternally fresh,
An April of light,
Washing in from ashen Rome,
Its gilt Augustan Age gone silvery...
But light is light,
Pristine, liberating,
Ineluctably elect,
So here it is, blazing the eyes,
Liquefying diamonds,
In Cosma's cosmos-unfolding verse.
(Her words revive Ovid - but in Canuck English:
See Ovid with a halo of wasps.)

Inspect herein a different slant to the line:
Emily Dickinson donning Sylvia Plath's persona
(Or vice versa),
Edgar Allen Poe playing William Blake
(Or vice versa),
Or the Quebecoise poet, Marie Uguay,
Being resurrected amid gold gloom-
I mean, this iridescent Arctic.

Every dream has its sly haunting-
Fears intolerably sexual,
Desires unnaturally mysterious,
Such lucid make-believe-
So Cosma's poetry yields buried music,
Cheery debauchery, infamous blood,
Tinsel crucifixes, stale-dated news,
Cankered wine, mutilated bread,
Bookish stains, zero worry, sub-zero love,
Luxurious phantasms, disorderly shates and stars,
The souring of poor balconies,
And rust lingering on into August corn.

No yatterer or yammerer,
No occult cultivator,
Cosma produces a scrupulous surrealism,
Fairy-tales that bite,
Proverbs Byzantine.

Her lines pierce the brain like an "Authentic" Sazarac Cocktail-
(That ruthless New Orleans concoction
Of bourbon, brandy, and burning caramel),
Or maybe like Romania's infernal Tuica grappa-
Clear music-
Generic, organic,
Impacting...

Cosma really is archetypical
Light: Lustre atypical.