swifts  &  s l o w s · a quarterly of crisscrossings

into a widened sphere
Michael Begnal

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Pangur Dubh

after the 9th-century Gaelic poem ‘Pangur Bán’

Myself and my black cat
both of one breath—
his belly filled with food,
I fill mine with formlessness

forgetting self or birth
and setting my books aside
I sit and find the cat
beside me in my work,

we two alone in the house
pursuing the internal art,
first the slow inhales
and then their circulation

as he circles his black head
up against my belly
where the energy congeals
like photo-negative emulsion

on a plastic strip,
and he is beside me
when from the body’s center
I expand the golden light

into a widened sphere
and conduct its golden
liquid into the lungs—
Pangur lolls lengthened,

purrs as I compress
the marrow of my bones—
neither of us knows
the outcome of our work

but continue flying afar,
like bats through bright space,
he and I each day,
our energies mingling mid-selves

Homage to Djuna Barnes

Who are they we choose
for ours, people pretending
to be other people

or ordering groceries
through Manhattan streets
in the 1970s

they whom we imbue
with gold leaf/
gold leaves of the mind?

—in old age
she looked like my grandmother,
drank like her too—

and in art,
when it’s over, too,
when it all trails out,

a signature, an autograph
on typewriter paper,
baroque, framed

down and out in the wind
“his ladies lake”
her name on a letter,

Djuna
jet, the compression of black woods,
ugly scenes in prose
not unlike panthers copulating
and * * * in the woods, their

beauty our/or burlesque,
as even in her metered line
revel wretchèd anight—
never admit this homage because
even if you gave in to it,
she is nobody’s muse

Poem for Iggy Pop of the Stooges, 1969/70

“Fame and notoriety and money and all those things are attractive. But
they’re not really [as] attractive to me as the musical forest in which I live.
I’m not gonna come out of my musical forest for anybody.”
—Iggy Pop interviewed by Dave Marsh, Creem, May 1970

What is the relation
between art
and the record industry?

The Stooges bluffed their way
onto Elektra and felt that they could make
radical art with only minimum compromise

What nature the compromise?
It is the mutual (co-)promise of benefit,
that the record company

would make their money,
the Stooges theirs perhaps
but that the label distribute

their Attalian noise, compositions
that shook the flesh in waves of darkness
a life of strangeness, four walls and a TV—

From what springs boredom?
the excess of a consumer society,
violence ritualized by class,

the hostility of the crowd,
it is enough to have an animal body,
and in it is the music centred,

located on a stage or amongst the people
on the floor (moving in and out of them)
bodies buffeted by the sound

of the band’s amps,
electric power mingling
with pretty animal cells, shaking

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Michael Begnal is author of the collections Future Blues (Salmon Poetry, 2012) and Ancestor Worship (Salmon Poetry, 2007), the chapbooks Tropospheric Clouds (Adjunct Press, 2020) and The Muddy Banks (Ghost City Press, 2016), and the critical monograph The Music and Noise of the Stooges, 1967-71: Lost in the Future (Routledge, 2022). He teaches writing at Ball State University.