Poem Brut #92 – Music / Lyrics
There’s a charity shop near where I live that has a ‘free box’ outside the door filled with things deemed unworthy of a price tag.
I rummaged through the box and found this old folder of musical notation.
I imagined who it might’ve belonged to and conjured a vision of an austere piano teacher (male).
In the 93rd of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Michael Sutton.
Between Friends: On the Writing of Herv é Guibert
Herv é Guibert has known of his AIDS diagnosis for three months when To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life begins. He is alone in Rome, the T4 count in his bloodstream continues to decline, yet he has convinced himself that he will be one of the first to escape the disease. It is discomfiting, given the decade. One wonders whether he is privy to something obscured from the reader or just cruelly optimistic. Resisting his own spiritual and bodily collapse, Guibert wants nothing to do with the procession of strangers walking the street beside him. His friends, whose prudence he ignores, pester him with their phone calls of concern. His patience lasts only for his new book, “the only friend whose company I can bear at present.” At a time when his days have become desperately numbered, why must he insist on ill will?
Luis Polanco reviews To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life by Herv é Guibert translated by Linda Coverdale and Written in Invisible Ink: Selected Stories by Herv é Guibert translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman.