Hand-sewn
32 pages
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Cryptozoo
12 Writers Respond to Images by
Erik Schurink
Edited by
Ecphrasis is a “calling out.” It is a kind of writing that creates a graphic description in words of an image and bypasses a conventional naming. Instead of saying, “This is what you’re seeing,” it says, “Here is something you can see in this picture.” Ecphrases of animals are always interesting, since animals elude the names we give them, are shy and hide from being seen, using speed, tricks, camouflage, mimicry, the disguising of body-form. They are there when we think they are not, and, sometimes, not there in fact when we think they are.
In this collection a dozen writers have created ecphrases of animal forms seen and photographed by Erik Schurink in a variety of settings whose one common trait was their lack of any literal animals.
The 6th Avenue Simurgh is a House Sparrow, Passer domesticus, that makes its nest in the unoccupied niche of a worn patch of pavement. In North Africa, the Simurgh is much more colorful.
This is not like being outdoors: next to the delicatessen, a dropped hairnet, a liver sausage sandwich made of papier-mâché. A dog willfully parades in deposits of light, from which the stars have disappeared.
Everything is tossing in the season of distress. On the street, a finch broods. The finch’s excuse: he recalls the legend of the Phoenix. The finch lights a nervous flame and immolates himself. The heron hisses, “Foolish.”
So Corina Bardoff opens her lyrical “Birds Wish To Outlive Men,” a text composed of language from Farid Ud-din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, Jorge Luis Borges’ description of the Simurgh in The Book of Imaginary Beings, a bird-watching guide, and several Frank O’Hara poems. Erik Schurink, in “Whistleblowers will show berets how tribes swell,” conflates Julian Assange with Reynard the Fox in his many-gated castle of Maleperduys, deploying anagrams and other constraints. Other contributors include McFeely Sam Goodman, Emily Haydock, Gretchen E. Henderson, Denis Hirson, Tom La Farge, Jennifer Nelson, Alicita Rodriguez, Maria Schurr, Joseph Starr, and Wendy Walker.