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Table of Contents
The Bordighera Poetry Prize
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Robert
Viscusi
Sample
Poems from A New Geography of Time
Poems:
Broken Piano |
The Place You Left Your Violin|
Website
 Robert
Viscusi, the author of "The Three Rules of IAWA," has published
the novel Astoria (Guernica Editions, American Book Award
1996) and the performance poem An Oration upon the Most Recent
Death of Christopher Columbus (VIA Folios). He has published
numerous essays in books and journals on Italian American literature
and culture, among them "Breaking the Silence: Strategic Imperatives
for Italian American Culture," which appeared in the first number
of VIA: Voices in Italian Americana and became a manifesto
for Italilan American Writers Association. Viscusi has been a
fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and of the
John D. Calandra Italian American Institute. He serves as a Professor
of English and executive officer of the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute
for the Humanities at Brooklyn College, as well as president of
the Italian American Writers Association. The following poems
come from his collection, A New Geography of Time (Guerica
Editions, 2003.)
The Broken Piano
All pianos are broken.
Before performances, tuners do what they can.
A piano has thousands of parts: wood, metal, felt.
Getting them all to work well together is an art of approximation.
At best.
The hammer felt may suffer from hysteresis, the strings may suddenly
snap.
Tuning is never perfect, voicing is always debatable.
All pianists are broken piano pianists.
Some of them do not know this.
They believe in the fictions of tuners.
They play as if the piano was exactly what it ought to be.
Others use tuners, but expect less,
Approaching harmony as a limit, not as a substance.
And some of us play pianos no tuner has touched in a long time.
Before playing, we assess the damage.
We work around the piano's bad spots.
It's still music.
The
Place You Left Your Violin
You were sometimes forgetting
it in a taxi or a restaurant.
It was worth a lot of your father's money, and that seemed to
be the reason.
One night you went to the opera.
In the intermission you carried it down to the orchestra pit and
left it on the railing.
Anyone better than you, you thought.
Nonetheless, your card was inside the case.
The superstitious conductor called you the next day.
He thought it was incredibly dangerous to have found such a thing.
He refused to accept a reward.
He would not even take a sip of grappa.
You tried to trade it for a set of the works of James Audubon.
The woman who owned the books said you could have them if you
would spend a
weekend with her in the woods.
After you got married you bought a glass violin.
You left this one in your office as a reminder of the other one
at home.
The critic comes to visit your book collection.
The large f of the violin appears on your bookplate.
"I don't know," you tell him, "I haven't played it for years."
The
Website
The Web site is made of many pages.
Someday these pages will be as big as swimming pools.
You will go to one and then go swimming in a hypertext chain.
Virtual swimming is not many computing generations away.
They will use implants so that you seem to be swimming.
It feels like water though the fish are not convincing.
Real fish go faster.
The water will seem to resist your swimming.
Real water supports you as it resists you.
Virtual water does not heal cuts.
Yes it does.
Copyright
©2005 by Robert Viscusi from A New Geography of Time,
Guernica Editons, 2004. All rights reserved by the author.
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