I’ve been meaning to post something by Anis Mojgani since I first started this scrapbook. And while I feel there’s something in Mojgani’s work that these videos don’t quite capture, there’s no use waiting for perfection.

As a representative of the night-time cereal eaters, among several other characters listed, I give you “Shake the Dust”:

And be patient with this one — it really unfolds in the last minute or so, from the moment he says: “Because every breathe I give…”:

“…and the answer comes:
Already am,
Always was,
And I still have time to be…”

To learn more about Anis Mojgani: LiveJournal | MySpace

Listen to audio from IndieFeed’s Performance Poetry channel:

• Here Am I (I like this one better than the video version above)
• Shake the Dust
• Invincible
• Cradle
• for those who can still ride an airplane for the first time
• Direct Orders

My brain finds connections I can’t completely explain between the Shu Ting poem I posted last week and this passage by bell hooks:

“I did not wait for desegregation, for college, for creative-writing classes, for grown-ups to show me the way. I found my vocation. It called to me and I was determined to answer the call. I began to write in my girlhood. And I am writing still, moving swiftly into midlife with a body of words I have made into books beside me. No passion in my life has been as constant, as true as this love. No passion has been as demanding. When words call, to answer, to satisfy the urge, I must come again and again to a solitary place — a place where I am utterly alone. In that moment of grace when the words come, when I surrender to their ecstatic power, there is no witness. Only I see, feel, and know how my mind and spirit are carried away. Only I know how the writing process alchemically alters me, leaving me transformed. Other writers tell of how it works within them. Written words change us all and make us more than we could ever be without them. Still the being we become in the midst of the very act of writing is only ever intimately present to the one who writes.”

– from the preface to “remembered rapture”

“A drop of rain dripping from the clouds
Felt ashamed when it saw the vastness of the sea:
‘Where there is a sea, what am I!
If it is there, then I am nowhere.’
When it saw itself with humility
An oyster adopted it and nourished it with heart:
Fate carried on its work to such an extent
That it became a celebrated pearl, befitting a king.
It attained sublimeness when it humbled itself;
Knocking at the door of non-existence, it became
existent.”

– Saadi (Translated by Mirza Aqil-Husain) from Persian Poets