“An observed animal that moves in an odd dance, a snippet of line that seems written across a storm-filled sky.” (Kate Bucca on Cadenza)
Kate Bucca is a contributor to Half Mystic Journal’s fifth issue, cadenza. She is the author of Companion Plants (Fomite, 2014). She is pursuing her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she serves as a reader for Hunger Mountain and was the 2017 Vermont Book Award Fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Tishman Review, Limestone, The Nervous Breakdown, DigBoston, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. She holds a BFA from Goddard College and reviews manuscripts for the Jennifer DeChiara Literary Agency. Find more of her work at creaturesinminiature.com.
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We asked three of our Issue V contributors to share with us their personal definitions of cadenza: how it is formed, where it has been, what it could be. Here is Kate Bucca's vision of the saxophone laugh – the air of smoke & blue – the love affair as old-fashioned as it is timeless…
When my father-in-law passed away, my husband and I discovered a beautiful Technics direct drive turntable in an unused upstairs bedroom of his house. In a closet, we found hundreds of first-press records, the vinyl in near-mint condition. The collection contained a broad mix of Beatles and The Who and The Police. Carole King and King Crimson. John Prine and Elton John. Solace in the midst of overwhelming sorrow, the diamond stylus grooved out a soundtrack to remember by.
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In my family of origin, music was a wound. An open ache in a mother who studied voice performance but passed up dreams of operatic stardom for the domestic. She encouraged competition between siblings who possessed differing degrees of talent. My brother became an accomplished French horn player, joined the choir and a young men’s a cappella group, and won roles in his high school’s musicals. After seven years of playing, having learned on the very violin my mother had used as a girl, I set aside the instrument and turned inward, preferring the music coming through headphones, kept safe away from my mother’s criticism. In what would become a decades-long trend, I quit because I could never be good enough to satisfy.
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ICD-10-CM F42.2: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. A rigid definition for a disorder of rigidity. When I received my diagnosis, the doctors prescribed pills, and my parents oversaw the consumption, forcing me to open wide to prove I’d swallowed. Therapy, the dull fog of anti-depressants. There would be other diagnoses later, medicines even more mind-numbing: anti-psychotics, anti-epileptics. The only label that remains consistent is the first I received. Nothing eases my need to check, repeat, perfect.
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One night, my husband pulls out the vinyl collection he compiled as a teenager rebelling against his own family’s music-wounds, and puts on Cookin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet. I have encountered jazz before, of course, but primarily in an academic way, attempting to analyze, ascribe rules. But this night, the music jumps, cuts, flourishes in a way I don’t attempt to map out, recognizing the particular logic of feel. Daring my brain to let go, to follow, ecstatic in the improvisation. In the not-knowing.
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Writing presents a particular kind of challenge for me, demanding I release my need for perfection and for pattern while maintaining order enough for my words to cohere. Draft, rewrite, resist the urge to throw away, delete. This compulsion to strike out anything less than perfect arises especially when I work in fiction. But poetry allows a way out, coming as it so often does from spontaneous thought. An observed animal that moves in an odd dance, a snippet of line that seems written across a storm-filled sky. The cadenza of a trumpet solo, finally available to my less-than-musical hands.
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Kate Bucca's poem “August Shake”, along with twenty other pieces by contributors and two columns by the Half Mystic team, are compiled in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue V: Cadenza, a stunning collection of contemporary art, lyrics, and writing celebrating swing jazz and tapping feet, midnight on cobblestoned streets, drunken solo out a three-story window, drowsy night and clumsy dance, serenade with the stars as a microphone. It is available for preorder now.