Nothing meant the same as before

When I wasn't talking to Quincy Troupe at lunch, I was advancing in Surrealism in Greece. Loving it. Big time. Here is a piece from the first book, Blast Furnace, by the first author in the anthology, Andrea Embirikos. Just, remember. This is Surrealist. We are in Greece. Detach the part of your mind that remembers to screw the toothpaste lid back on, and how ...

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ISPAHAN

A most thunderous storm covered the country. Howling rocks assaulted the broad-brimmed lakes and the injured fish crawled to the anchorites' station. No aid was supplied there for the bellowing of megolosaurases scattered its fluttering on both sides and mushrooms kept silence over the actual facts in the hovering nuptial procession of a young planet's sighs. Afterwards nothing meant the same as before. Tranquility did not exist as a real entity. Disaster was curbed by camels. The temples of the dead were blooming. The few doves were laboring because the lake's pulp had formed a canal at the narrowest point of their passage through thousand-mouthed insults trampled with the frenzied noise of mothers and young children thinner than a bat's bones.

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As a boy who grew up in the shadow of a blast furnace and then grew up to score a weird Turkish prose poem (and then made a movie to that score) populated by bat wings and weird religious sects (like the anchorites), what can I say? This is me.

Ispahan, by the way, is a former Persian capital and one of the most famous cities in the production of Persian rugs, located in what is now Iran. Ispahan rug designs include intricate floral medallions or animal pictorial rugs. Ispahan also names a type of rose and a dessert that riffs off the shapes of the rose. To illustrate this poem, I flirted with some guy's Flickr site that documents his trip to Ispahan, but decided his photographs were too beautiful. I went, instead, with the imagery of the thin bat bones at the end of the poem. The image here is of a proto-bat fossil from some bat man dude's blog.