Jeanne Stauffer-Merle

A word on my poetic process :

When I’m in the process of writing, I’m fascinated by the mystery of the silence between words, in the same way, I suppose, that I find the pauses in our lives the most evocative. I’m drawn to that immeasurable (and impenetrable?) place that I cannot fill.

As I said in an interview on ekphrastic poetry with the editors of Beauty/Truth: A Journal of Ekphrastic Poetry, I find that the kind of art that resonates most for me, whether it is poetry or another medium, is that art which cannot be easily discussed or “translated” into prose. I believe the most poignant poetry connects with that part of ourselves that is not quite definable.   

It’s a strange irony to me that when I’m writing poetry, I’m trying to use words for what I cannot say. As a poet, I know that I’m edging along the truth, and sometimes my words feel mute. Oddly enough, this seems the most honest way of communicating.

    In addition, I think the more connections we make between different artistic disciplines, whether poetry-art, art-music, music-dance etc., the more we can learn about the creative
impulse—with both its positive and negative “space”— and all that it has to offer and teach.  

Three poems:

Within an Inch of Your (published in The Laurel Review) ; Miro’s Head (a response to Joan Miro’s “Head of Man”and published in Beauty/Truth: A Journal of Ekphrastic Poetry; Fizzling Out (published in Realpoetik).

Within an Inch of Your

There is a door where you’re to report the cold

and it would swing this way and that—

loose as fingers in oil—

if you touched it.

But this door is fragile and sharp-edged

as a man’s head crushed to his mother’s chest—

only a nod from stopping her breath.

Or it is a palm tree’s arms closing even as they open.

Or a child like a small bomb on the lip of a furious bath

Or a hawk perched to scream—

the face a plate dropping.

Or the arched bridge where you stood on one edge

that night the moon was a white eye

and you tried to calibrate a tension almost too beautiful to bear

and you thought you could stand there forever

imagining a perfect life—that soft purgatory of indecision

to balance the weight of remaining

with the empty step that waited—just a toe’s width beyond

like a door that hesitates in wind.

Or a hand hanging quietly by your side.

And you are that weather.

Miro’s Head

On a clear day at All Angles Road

your head pivots

the occipital lobe sliding askew and

(not like Picasso’s Tête de Femme)

your eyes bend the landscape into waves

the air smooth as petals.

You stand there mouth agape

waiting to tell someone about this miracle of perception

this new world without angles

but there is no language for the truth.

So you smear—

your soft head bleeding into itself

like a bludgeoned heart

a mouth full and empty as night.

But angels flood your eyes:

they spill out in long breathless threads

like rain or roads or wings lifting.

Fizzling Out

Reclining backwards on the ferry bleeds

into the past like sludge onto a sliding beach

beneath the sultry palm’s cool diagonal.

Here slogs the duck who is clearly at odds

doesn’t understand the forward

thrust of things:

for example, over there, where the homeboys are burning rubber.

On that able-bodied landscape the moments pile up

one clean point upon the other

into fiercely driving lines

like fresh tires that grind through to the end

leaving only razed intentions.

Time traveler is another word for pirate

the frenzied thief sailing clear

the rimed hours the crushing minutes

through a molecular dissolve where the world leaches softly

into skins supple and giddy

with eternity.