“Your work escapes all logical categories, including such stable categories as body/mind, reason/madness, normal/abnormal, nature/culture, pleasure/need, female/male. It caresses jouissance; a bliss without clear outlines, an orgasm without a body; it laughs at reason and makes fun of its prudent categories. I am a poet and I rely upon words, but your work leaves me tongue-tied, jumping up and down gesturing hysterically. Your work has no need of words, it simply shows and does not tell; it highlights a place beyond the Symbolic and its fascist structures. It shows another place woven in lace. Your work makes nonsense of structuralism and its obsessive search to reduce everything to deciphered structures and symbolic transactions. It puts under suspicion philosophy's grand claim to be a master discourse, a universal meta-discourse, that tells the undeniable story of Reason to all times and all people. Your work tiptoes around such skiting hierarchies, and is a concrete flight from representation, that subverts, disturbs the categories, and the perceptual and moral "certainties" that rely upon it.

Enclosed is a poem inspired by your work, it is unworthy of it, but the best I can do, There will be others. I have another one almost complete. Your work stretches my abilities, and I do not think my skill is adequate to do justice to your work. In time, I hope to have a series of poems based on your work. This is a real challenge, and no ten-minute ditty is going to be adequate, so it is going to take a lot of time and effort, but something that can only improve my poetry.”

With kindest regards,
john najjarr

Tainted Love

To Cathy Vogan, whose work transcends all logical categories, leaving the poet  tongue tied and pointing hysterically. A poet must write or forever be silent; your films stretch my abilities beyond breaking point; imperfect as this poem is, I give this poem to you in admiration.

This movement in its sequential flow
escapes time and its orderings.
This fluid flow, a film, is played out in time
but eludes these categories,
along with time's  brutal causality. For the darkness
between the stars is cut by this movement.
This eternal motion pays homage
to an endless deferral.
Through this difference, this delicate lament,
a step out,
a  cry to heaven,
the heart knows understanding
filtered through reason.?

Momentarily images become pure form,
shadowed by light;
for a transitory, agonizing heart beat
circular images escape the mechanical trap,
to linger between the stars,
the darkness is tenderly touched.

a sympathy of shadow,
a fetus in the womb, a dusty sob
escapes the dark spaces that surround us,
an echoing silence;
each tear drop moment,
a silence, subtle as
mid light, moon shivers;
or a darkness that settles
in silent spaces,
the floor of the heart.
those silver? places
deep within
whisper to silence

This sequential motion
is a mirror reflecting
the vast spaces that submerge us.
Silence that comes from
dark comforting places.
This bone bag of dust
becomes outlined by starlight.

A midnight, moon shiver.
beyond tearing reason
and this sense of exile,
for the  world is forever tiger-stripped
by? blurred meanings.
We settle comfortably into succession,
accepting these  threatening spaces.

This whisper in the heart,
its vastness dwells  in the eyes,
and distances that come between us.
A mist that escapes us
yet this whisper lingers long
after the distances;
long after? the sighs and murmurs,
after betraying lingering, intimate tender touch;
this  heart beat,
a glance, a tear drop
 returns to shadow;
to starlight tear light silence.
                                           
                                                          john najjar(30/8/09)