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Echo of Origin

John James

wedded sepal

lupine pearl strung

with toothhole petaled tendons

pelvis split

in ardor’s labor swirling blacksmoke

coins in the sea

the eyes hawkmoth

a bible palmed across granite telling

gin river parable the muddy

waters rising over

rotted apples liver carved

by eponymous

wind

John James is the author of Winter, Glossolalia (Black Spring Press Group, 2022) and The Milk Hours (Milkweed Editions, 2019). The recipient of fellowships and prizes from the University of California, Berkeley, the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice, and the Academy of American Poets, he lives in Berkeley.

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About this Poem

“‘Echo of Origin’ responds to Roland Barthes’s claim, in Mythologies, that ‘In wrestling,’— intellectual grappling—‘the gesture severs every parasitical meaning’ and produces ‘a pure and full signification.’ ‘Such emphasis,’ he claims, ‘is nothing but the popular and ancestral image of the perfect intelligibility of reality.’ I wanted to imagine a language that recalls that ‘perfect intelligibility’ by severing once-arbitrary signifiers from the system of signs that burdens them with meaning. Because we live in such a system, however, there is no pure signification. Instead, the poem forges a stream of disparate signifiers, firing at each other in loose association.”
—John James

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time bending / tongue / entwine / the betwixt

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Algae pushes north
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Echo of Origin

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