Slow Dancing by Malca Litovitz & ELANA WOLFF

Author:Malca Litovitz & ELANA WOLFF
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry Criticism
ISBN: 9781550714746
Publisher: Guernica Editions
Published: 2008-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

EW: Would you say that the bird is one of your key emblems?

ML: I’d certainly say it’s one of them. Light is another.

EW:Yes, light.You can’t have colour without light and colour also figures prominently – in To Light, To Water, also in At the Moonbean Café. In your second book, almost every single poem contains a colour – there’s orange, silver, brown, ruby, purple, blue, lilac . . . many colours. Black too, black even predominates. Was that conscious?

ML: I like black clothes. I wear a lot of black clothes, although I try to liven it up. I guess that’s one of the things that comes to mind . . . Black also takes us to death, and to darkness. And to the end of things. Maybe that hovers around the edge of the poems.

EW: Yet you can’t see colour without light. Goethe would say that you can’t have colour without the interplay of dark as well.

ML: I haven’t consciously put black in.

EW: It’s interesting, because when I noticed this aspect of At the Moonbean Café, I took another look at To Light, To Water. Colour figures there as well – you’ve got the long prose poem at the end called “Grey.” There’s also a lot of brown – brown eyes, brown earth.

ML: Brown is a very neutral, stable colour in To Light, To Water, representing a lot of home values, like wood and coziness and comfort. Simplicity and neutrality.

EW: Yes, in To Light, To Water there are more browns and greys, which are more earthy. And in Moonbean, besides black, there’s a lot of blue. There are three poems – “Oiseau Bleu” and “Bleu Clair” and the line “ocean bleu cracked china” in “Fantasy Flight” where the blue is spelled the French way. Where did that come from?

ML: I was working with wallpaper chips and I used to pick them up and use the names of the colours, to motivate and spark the poems. There was a chip called “Bleu Clair” and another chip called “Oiseau Bleu” – so the chips themselves are where the French names came from.

EW: On another note – are you at all concerned about the production of poetry, the relevance and utility of poetry?

ML: There was an article called “In Praise of Useless Things” but actually I think that the human soul needs poetry and that it will always be around and that it serves a real function in our psyche.

EW: It’s a kind of primal language.

ML: But there’s a bias against it in the contemporary scene.

EW: What do you think that bias is about?

ML: I don’t know if people were wrecked with poetry in high school because the teachers have such set views of what it should mean that they rammed it down their students’ throats and didn’t let the students discover the poetry themselves. Poetry is actually a very easy medium in some ways. I mean you can pick up a poem and read it in a few minutes, whereas a novel takes hours.

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