The Sforzando Letters (a selection)
In our reading period for Issue VIII: Sforzando, we received hundreds of love letters alongside your stunning submissions: about music & hope, about poetry & breaking, about your favourite ice cream flavours & the songs that keep getting stuck in your head. As always, your words made us laugh & thrill & cry & sing, made us wake up & stand up, made us feel the spine of the why behind our work. Here, then, is a smattering of our favourite notes accompanying Issue VIII submissions. Thank you, songbirds, for sharing your warmth with us. We don’t take it for granted.
Half Mystic Journal’s eighth issue is a stunning collection of contemporary art, lyrics, & writing celebrating the car-struck dissonance—the backslide into wreckage—the single note of shattering. Sforzando is an issue of the body & its expulsions, its disasters, its tectonic shifts. As the world around us snags on the barbs of sickness, we write a livewire lovesong, a hymn to open wounds. The breakage faces us, & we face the breakage, & neither looks away. It is available for preorder now.
Greetings Half Mystic. Here’s a story. Hopefully a little piece of it will get stuck in your teeth.
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I have been following Half Mystic for some time now, and am deeply enamored with the beauty and light that you strive to bring into this world.
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About me: I am young and want to live an interesting life. It might be a curse, but right now I’m not ready to live quietly. Not yet. Now I want to live and burn.
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I’m sending this to Half Mystic because (a) I like your aesthetic, and (b) you promised not to flinch.
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I was deep into a writing project recently (a screenplay) and the only thing I could listen to while writing was 1) lo-fi “chamber pop” with electronics and female voices (Blonde Redhead, Michelle Gurevich, Warpaint, Broadcast) and 2) Afro-Caribbean or West African drumming, like Bomba y Plena. Preferably simultaneously: one playing on Spotify, one on YouTube.
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My writing always explores and exploits the porous boundaries between language and music (in many languages these two words are synonymous).
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Music is the language under all language to me. I choose Half Mystic because these stories travel the path of mysticism and lyricism, which perfectly ordinary people cover on a daily basis.
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I’m a singer-songwriter (mostly piano but sometimes guitar) and have always sought, restlessly, a way to clarify for myself the relationship between music and poetry. My parents are both musicians. I began life as a folk singer, then shifted during my education into being a formal-verse poet, and only later unstrung myself to write whatever these pieces are. Ultimately, I don’t know that there’s a difference between words and notes, which are just different kinds of sounds; but I do know you can’t lie and sing at the same time, and the bridge of a song is where the singer has to tell the truth. Half Mystic seems to live within that collision and collaboration, which makes me feel at home.
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Music and life are inextricable; one cannot exist without the other. There’s no such thing as a silent world.
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I’ve been following your journal for a while now, and was lucky enough to procure a copy of your interlude issue on a trip to Singapore! Poetry journals don’t show up often in mainstream bookstores where I’m from, so the issue is special to me.
I’ve always gravitated towards endeavors that aim to unpack the relationship between poetry and music, so the idea of being part of what Half Mystic is doing exhilarates me, and makes me feel less alone. You guys get that it’s deeper than ekphrasis.
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I was inspired by your description “a single note of shattering.” In 2017 circumstances outside my control lead to the loss of the use of my right shoulder and debilitating pain. Back then I described it as feeling like a shepherd’s whistle, which tricks your brain into thinking it’s going higher when it isn’t. I stopped listening to music for 2 years because it clashed too strongly with what grief and pain sound like in my head. I am hoping to eventually to write a book about the process of healing and dealing with chronic pain and disability. I want to submit this piece to you, because you seem like the kind of people who would understand what that experience makes you want out of art.
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As an amateur pianist and avid reader, I believe musical phrasing, narrative and rich vocabulary are the greatest influences on my writing—exemplified by my firm belief in le mot juste and my conceptualization of punctuation marks as having different values akin to musical rests.
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i got my start in lyrical music journalism because music has always made me want to write, and the first poems i wrote as a kid were songs. which is to say, i’ve been training to write to you my whole life.
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I wrote these poems while thinking about work in its various forms—the obvious work the word implies to most of us, our occupations, but also other work, the work of relationships, of love, of belief, of making art, of simply living. I tried to think about the body, and how even office work happens to the body, how love does, how different bodies work and react to work differently. I tried to think about the small ways work works on us, and how “the economy” affects us emotionally, physically. I also tried to honor both the delight I often find in all these kinds of work, and the sacredness and strangeness which accompanies it.
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I play the shakuhachi. My favourite note is called ro and my favourite way to play it is muraiki, which is a windy blasting sound. One night I hope to play ro muraiki as well as the south wind.
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For me, home is synonymous with music. There is not a memory of home—both in childhood or in the ones I have built as a woman in the world—that does not include the presence of music.
I grew up in a town founded on heightened toxic masculinity, a force that has written the history of my lineage in many ways. These particular poems attempt to excavate this influence, this force, and the music that is built into the structures and landscapes of memory and loss. It is my hope that by doing so, the reverberations that come from both can be re-imagined in some way.
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What an elegant and unique journal you offer up! I love the colors, the feel, the way it smiles. …
Recently I’ve been remembering my growing-up years in Memphis, Tennessee, where I spent many nights awake in bed, transfixed by the music coming over my hand-built crystal radio set. Muddy Waters, Elvis, The Reverend Al Green, W.C. Handy, the Bar-Kays. I remember hearing Ella Fitzgerald’s “How High the Moon” and I was mesmerized; the others were powerful, but this was alchemy of the highest order.
A few months ago I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, which makes me shake and stutter; I’m young for this, and struggling to adjust. And something in Ella’s improvisations made me feel less out of sync, less strange. She was on repeat for days, until I realized these poems were waiting to be written.
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Poetry—true poetry—is an alchemy of music and mysticism. Or maybe music is an alchemy of mysticism and poetry. These strands of human experience and expression thread our individual narratives to the universal tapestry in a choir of angelic transcendence, rhythmic blood. If we are able to transcribe the specific throb of existence from our own arterial channels, to offer a gemstone polished by static to the painted wavelength of cosmic radios, we open the silent vessels of our isolated perspective to the aural rivers of eminent melody. We add something unique to the unblemished harmony of life itself.
It is my most sincere wish, as a poet and songwriter, to work with a press that understands humanity within the context of music. That finds music in everything. That finds within it a cartography of our kaleidoscopic experience of the sacred. The ecstatic. The divine.
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I write, as Roethke says, “to solve all the leaps of light.” I write at once fierce and fragile poems to do with letters what Thelonious Monk did with piano keys.
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In 1998 I was a sixteen-year-old with an offer to pursue a professional music career—but I also had severe tinnitus. The experience of tinnitus is often sudden and strongly accented. My decision to let go of music felt like a backslide into wreckage.
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Music gives name to even my most tumultuous feelings, gives harbor when I am most at sea. … I am submitting to Half Mystic Press because I think so many of the pieces you publish exist simultaneously as art and as a reflection of why we need to consume and create art.
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What does music mean to me? A form that gives voice to what is not yet articulated. … Your press is what I imagine a good home for this work to be; that is, a place that is eclectic and entangled in a project to extend the boundaries of independent publishing beyond their typical reaches.
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It’s a poem that relies on the trickster trochaic foot to conjure a cosmic chant or psalm cataloguing 4,000 years of folk methods of contraception and abortion. It takes place on the sidewalks of the universe.
I’m thinking of this poem for your sforzando issue not only because it engages two kinds of musical forms, the playground song and the psalm, but because the trochee is the sudden, strongly-accented poetic foot—poets infrequently work with it because it so readily conjures up nursery rhymes and can feel overdone. But because this poem straddles formal and temporal worlds, I chose to use what one poet has called “the foot of reversals.”
This poem is one piece of a longer project I’ve been at work on for years—and by “project” I do mean a book of poems, but also a way of living, of making art, of doing activism, and of talking about fertility control in ways that eschew the vacated terms of the normative “abortion debate.” …
And, since you mention ice cream on your submissions page, I’ll just go ahead and tell you that my favorite flavor is grape nut.
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In all honesty, this submission has been a months-in-the-works procrastination because I’ve been a little daunted by the literary crush I developed while finding out about your journal. What I try to do with a poem is to create the same feeling of bigness a truly resonant song or album does. A simultaneous condensation of existence into a very real, now while also an expansion of wonder and awareness. I’m trying to be succinct, but it’s hard.
Anyway, I dawdled about whether this poem related enough to the theme. It’s not as cataclysmic as my initial reading of it was. But on second thought, it felt right. At least to me. The poem I’m submitting is about a happier sforzando full of potentiality and fierce love for a silly moment with friends, even while one is feeling very, very lost and a bit sad. It’s that shattering moment where the chorus to “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” fills the room and you slough off all that dry, crackly uncertainty and all-consuming sourceless need.
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I am enthralled with you. Smitten. Your approach is open and tender. You water the garden. I love music. I love dawn. I am a fool for the vast sorrow of sunset. These are reasons I feel simpatico with you. I have made your beautiful radio pieces an internet favorite easily accessed.
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A little bit about what H/M means to me: Last April, when my grandmother passed, my house was nothing short of a portrait: rain slanting in white whips, the flowers unwrinkling into the morning, my parents moving spinelessly to fill the mouth of each doorway, each crevice. When something looks like cinema, I’ve grown to feel wary, nervous, a warning bell red and bright in my ear. In the words of Quentin Compson’s father in The Sound and the Fury—who, admittedly, may not be the most adept at giving advice, given the happenings of the book—purity is a negative state, one which nature tends to avoid. In my case, perfection scares me because it signals a lack of understanding. In short, intimacy and verbal connection is not something I have been taught to do, and when I see unmoving bodies and a patina of metal, I begin to speak inwards through the creative arts. I took up piano and charcoals to give my fingers something to do, and I’ve become enamored with interdisciplinary study. And I felt rhythm start to awaken in my writing, a type of quiet lyric. Reading H/M reminds me that there are others out there who share my Miyazaki-like appreciation for the simple pulse of art.
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Music, place, order, chaos, family, mind, travel, war, the physical world, paradox, human imagination, passions, and contrariness obsess and perplex me, disturb my sleep, and inhabit my poems. Sometimes I wake from sleep, hearing Bach, fado, Shakira, bluegrass, Coltrane, ancient music, or U2. More often than not, I do not know where the poems come from.
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I’m listening to the song “Los Cojolites” by Son de Mar as I think about the question of what music means to me. I first heard this regional style of Mexican folk music called Son Jarocho last night. We were headed to a parade for Day of the Dead here in Mexico City and just as we were nearing the densest crowds in the city center, it started pouring, strangely large drops that were nearly hail, but it was pleasant in the sense of baptism or mikvah, and we skirted along streets until we were soaked through and took shelter under a narrow ledge. Hundreds of others stood under similar ledges, all grinning with the sheer wonder of this public gathering gone astray, a dramatic detour, and by then the lightning was crackling, eerily nearby, and the parade long forgotten. We saw that there were cafes and bars farther up the street and so I grabbed my girlfriend’s hand and we fled, my brown shoes blackened, running cinematically (I imagined), ankle deep in puddles, and then, we whisked ourselves into Pata Negra, presumably a bar, and it just felt welcoming. There was a table right in the corner for two and it was dry and they had one of my favorite drinks, a carajillo. As if just for our arrival, the Jarocho band started playing, a couple guitars, and what I later learned was a marímbula, and lyrics I didn’t quite understand, but evoking a searching for joy in sadness, almost like fado, at least it felt to me. Hearing that, being there, the sense of a moment flooded with color—that is my stab at what music means to me.
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I feel at times my poems are more music than words.
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Music, to me, means the pulsing in the blood and the rush of moving water. It means feeling so singularly present within my body that nothing exists but moving muscle and beating heart catching upon an errant bassline. It means feeling 16, clinging to my best friend’s fingers and singing Fall Out Boy at the top of my lungs or holding hands with a stranger at a Florence + the Machine gig, crying with joy and heartache at once. Music is the almost-throb of silence at midnight with headphones a buffer against hospital machinery, and it is the roar of wind and blood in my ears at the apex of a hike. Music is the binding rhythm which holds poetry, and by extension, the universe, together.
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To me a “single note of shattering” feels as if it stretches time. In my experience of disaster, both large and small, the ending is never the ending I imagined. In the writing of these poems, I experienced something similar in which they started in one place only to end somewhere else. Their sforzando is internal. I believe my poems sing with the dissonance that lives in between love and longing. I hope the soft chaos of my work translates through and is what you are looking for in this issue.
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For the first half of my life, music was the thing I liked best about being alive, being embodied, being me. I was happiest at the piano. I asked for manuscript paper from Santa. I was Mozart for a Brownie badge. I spent most of 1982 belly-down on the carpet poring over the liner notes to “Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road.” I refused to learn times tables except 2s, 4s, and 8s because I needed to divide beats but not much else. And then I got a real bad case of arthritis when I was 12, and although I eked out a degree in music, I gradually lost—for a while at least—not music but the ability to make it. I was swollen from arthritis and also engorged with music I couldn’t express. I tattooed my body with musical notation to remind myself that I was inherently music(al), but the surgical scars were louder than the marks I chose for my unruly body. For a time, I had nothing to do with the piano or with the harpsichord, and that was the darkest time in my life. I was saved only by teachers, by keyboards of a different kind. I wrote a four-voice story in fugue form and submitted it to a creative writing teacher rolled up in a film can; I recorded it on my analog four-track on the floor of a shitty apartment. I wrote away from music and, shit, wouldn’t you know it, I wrote my way right back to music. I wrote and published a memoir in sonata-allegro form and the publisher didn’t give me the deckle edges I wanted but they gave me piano keyboards dancing across the chapter headings and they gave me a torn-paper collage on the cover that looked all at once like what the book was about: keyboards and smashed fingers and the compulsion to compose no matter what, and I loved it I loved it, I would get that cover tattooed on me if that weren’t ridiculous and also forbidden by my orthopedic surgeons because I live always in fear of infection. I wrote to console myself over the loss of music and all it did was bring me back to the piano. The fall after my book came out, I performed in a duet with the great (and arthritic) concert pianist Byron Janis. When I toured about that book—bookstores and classical music radio stations, mostly—people always asked: Do you still play piano? And what are you working on now? The answer is… this. Not overtly about music, no, but infected with it. Engorged with it. Anything I write is.
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Half Mystic Press makes my manuscript homesick.
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I don’t cry, but I am crying as I listen to Big Thief’s “Not”, and I do not dance, but I am dancing when I listen to anything by Sylvan Esso. I am not a religious person, but when I listen to Lucinda Williams, I come close.
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I have been reading your seventh issue, aubade, and trying to think about what it means to interpret music as poetry. I have not been able to play the piano for about 10 years now, but some terminology remains. Sforzando, to me, is about the emergence from wreckage, and the finding of music in fragments. Not the echo, but music in and of itself. That, at least, is how I’ve chosen to interpret your theme. I’m grateful for how it has led me to think about Achilles and Patroclus’ afterlife, and how Patroclus’s voice must have eventually found Achilles. I like to think the poem ends on hope, that they emerge to something new.
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It has always been this way with me—I fall for a musician not because of their talent in and of itself, but because music makes me vulnerable whether I want to be or not.
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I suspect music is the first experience we have: in the womb, learning the cadence of our gestational parent’s heart. From then on, everything we experience has a rhythm, a sound, a reverberation in the body—when I think about the connection between music and my writing, this is what comes to mind. … As a writer, I am interested in how lyrical language can bring into focus the quick and often unpredictable movements of the ruminating brain. I am also interested in creating a space for my readers to sit with experiences that are simultaneously widely experienced yet often experienced very privately: griefs, illnesses, births, and dreams.
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During the time of COVID, I’m reminding myself how much I’m loving the Mountain Goats’ album Goths—super underrated, wonderful concept album. Particularly, I’ve really been feeling “Unicorn Tolerance.” There’s one part that’s been on my mind: “long life to the spiders / safe travels to the crows / love to the ghosts / who taught me everything I know.“
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Right now the world is full of strong hope and strong despair at the same time. If you think about it, it’s remarkable that the two are happening at once. We are faced with the prospect everything could change for the better or for the worse—though right now we are in a lot of grief.
I live by a pond that often reflects the sky’s color. It makes me think of mirror verses, or parallel universes, à la Star Trek. In stories with parallel universes, there is often a blissful utopia world as well as a terrible, ravaged world. Whatever world the protagonist comes from is often an in-between world.
But perhaps there is no perfect world or unspeakably terrible world. Perhaps each parallel universe is monstrous and beautiful in a different way, and there’s no escaping imperfection and strife. There’s no escaping wounds. There is always the demand to heal. That might be the definition of a world.