For the Twentieth Century
Bound, hungry to pluck again from the thousand technologies of ecstasy boundlessness, the world that at a drop of water rises without boundaries, I push the PLAY button:— . . .Callas, Laurel & Hardy, Szigeti you are alive again,— the slow movement of K.218 once again no longer bland, merely pretty, nearly banal, as it is in all but Szigeti's hands * Therefore you and I and Mozart must thank the Twentieth Century, for it made you pattern, form whose infinite repeatability within matter defies matter— Malibran. Henry Irving. The young Joachim. They are lost, a mountain of newspaper clippings, become words not their own words. The art of the performer.
From the chapbook Music Like Dirt, published by Sarabande Books. Copyright © 2002 by Frank Bidart. Reprinted by permission of Sarabande Books. All rights reserved.