Eyewear is very pleased to welcome Fortner Anderson (pictured) to its pages this Friday. Known for the performances of his poems, read a cappella, he has been an active member of the Montreal "spoken word" scene for years prior to the use of the term "spoken-word".In June of 2002, he was invited to Genoa, Italy to open the 8th edition of the Genoa International Poetry Festival. In February of 2004 he was a featured performer at the Festival Voix D'ameriques in Montreal reading works in English and French. In November of 2004 he was a featured reader at the «10° mondes parallèlles» festival in Lilles, France.
He is a co-founder and a producer with the audio publishing venture Wired On Words (wiredonwords.com), and participated in the development of the Ultimatum II Urban Poetry Festival of 1985. He is the host of a radio show, Dromostexte, a one-hour show which plays only poems and spoken word recordings, heard each week on CKUT-FM (www.ckut.ca). His past projects include: The Odyssey, an itinerant software, Montreal's Dial-A-Poem service, and Oralpalooza the Montreal spin-off from the Lollapalooza shows. He has performed his work at "Outloud Live" at the PanCanadian Wordfest in Calgary, Alberta and dozens of poetry readings and festivals. Performance venues have included the Banff Centre (Alberta), Cabaret (Montreal), the Rivoli (Toronto), and St-Mark’s Church (New York).
His poems have been recorded on the Wired On Words compilation (WOW, 1993), Millennium Cabaret (WOW, 1998) and La Vache Enragée (Planète Rebelle, 1998), and have been published in Poetry Nation (Vehicule Press, 1998). His own CD sometimes I think appeared in 2000 (WOW).
His new CD project, Six Silk Purses was released in October of 2005 on the Wiredonwords label and it is distributed via Ambiance Magnetiques (www.ambiancemagnetiques.com).
For more information see www.fortneranderson.com.
He dreams of wild horses
In the bedroom of the farmer's daughter
are dreams of wild horses
tamed
held tight in their stalls
their flesh a lather, and muscles quaking
the little road-side salt-box pulses
and a glow seeps into the summer night
His hands at the wheel
the odometer unravels into hopeless tangles over his ruined shoes
In this heap of years gone soft
He flounders and drowns
thinking he must catch the one taut thread
the single solid piece
His head turns
the false star burns bright
and gathers a swarm from the dark and humid fields
and he feels his hungry specters heave and cluster over the broken pile of all his days
He conjures
the neck of a paper swan
bent and twisted
in a puddle of ash and beer
He remembers and plunges his fingers into the past
between elastic and thigh
into a maze of closely wrought hair
to a summer day
when the buzz of a myriad of wings
held his tongue, his knees buckled
and the dying field grass bloodied his naked palms
His eyes touch the flashing meridian
his hands regain the wheel
and that murderous order
of wings and blood and sun
that picture-perfect
tiny house and barn and shed
held tight in light and black
speed past and fall back
into the dark well of the world
poem by Fortner Anderson; from Six Silk Purses.
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