Feral Tenderness: Poetry And Photography

By Arthur Rosch

This book, Feral Tenderness, is the fulfillment of a dream. This volume has both poems and photographs. It unites two of my four creative media into a single opus.

One night in 2002, I was performing at a venue near my home. I was reading poetry and playing drums. The drums were to accompany another poet who enjoyed my mallet work, the throb of tribal call and response. Two of my thick black notebooks of poetry lay at the lip of the stage. When I finished playing the drums, I looked for my books and they were gone. Gone! My poetry books. I had noticed a tall shaggy man looming around the stage and I knew that he had stolen my poetry. The books were full of my handwritten notes and poems. I had no copies.

Why would he do that? Was he a representative of the devil? I don’t believe in the devil. I believe in evil, that it must be necessary for evil to exist or we would never learn anything.

In all the years since that night I have pined for those black-bound books, missing my poems like absent friends. I don’t remember the poems I’ve lost. The only remedy for those missing poems is to write new poems.

I never decide to write a poem. It’s more like a meteor striking from space. When a poem arrives in my mind it is an event. It happens in the form of a line or two that I can take to the computer and flesh out. A poem is being born. In the next days I revise a bit, but the poems are mostly formed right out of the starting gate.

Watching a poem take shape is like seeing a fast-motion video of a plant growing. First there’s a nub rising from the earth. That nub quickly grows and shafts of green matter reach from its central pillar, pushing ever up and out, writhing towards the sun. It’s a little creepy, watching the otherwise invisible motion of organic matter living in an alien time frame. We don’t see trees grow or corn ripen. It happens beneath our layer of cognition.

I can speculate that the poems are already in my mind, they have existed since the beginning of time. The poems came before me and will continue when I’m gone. That may sound like a conceit. I don't care.

Perhaps that’s why I feel such a kinship with the 12th Century poet, Jelalludin Rumi. His poems sound modern, his concerns reach into my core and go with me everywhere.

One of my favorite Rumi lines is this: “Don’t worry about what doesn’t come. By not coming it prevents disaster.” I’ve spent my life worrying about the absence of an audience for my protean work. Why am I so completely obscure? Is it because my work is not good?

I don’t think so. I’ve been tasked with carrying an unshakeable belief in myself. It’s not easy to maintain. My life has been notably inglorious. I’ve learned that great art seldom comes from great human beings.

Plenty of people have had delusions of superior talent, have called themselves Genius. It’s a meaningless word that only exists for the purposes of ego. A zillion mediocre artists haunt the landscape of our world, vying for attention. What makes me different?

I ask you to regard this work, these poems and images. You will see that I am what I think I am. You may also note that I haven’t told you what I think I am. Take care, what you think of yourself. It will form you in ways you can’t anticipate. If fame and glory fail to arrive according to your timetable, think of the plants growing, writhing, eerie when viewed in high-speed video. Take care to be both honest and superb. That is the core message of Feral Tenderness. Stay wild but stay gentle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arthur Rosch
• Release date: Feb 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393311263

Arthur Rosch

Art Rosch was raised in the suburbs of St. Louis. He attended Western Reserve and Wayne State University, but wasn't much of a student. He worked through his teens and twenties as a jazz and blues drummer. He met a girl who liked poets, so he became a poet. He found that he was attracted to the writing more than to the girl. He began exploring the novel form in the late seventies and wrote his first novel around '77. It was terrible.In 1969 Art moved to the San Francisco area. His first sale was to Playboy Magazine in '78. The story won "Best Story Of the Year" and he enjoyed fifteen minutes of fame. Since then he's been doing what most writers do: collecting bales of rejections and honing his craft. He has published in EXQUISITE CORPSE, TRUCKIN', SHUTTERBUG, POPULAR PHOTOGRAPHY and, yes, CAT FANCY. Art loves science fiction and fantasy and much of his writing is inspired by the work of Philip K. Dick and Jack Vance. He teaches courses in amateur astronomy and photography through local parks and recreation centers.

Book preview

Observations of Life

Zizz!

Seeing Is Believing

A blinded soul

is a stubborn thing.

It must be ground and battered,

shocked, in the hope that one day

it will remember how to see.

So stubborn, it keeps its eyelids

tightly shut, until it must be thrown

into the furnace of stars, and exhaled

into the loneliness of space.

So blind that it must be exiled

time and again, into bodies that are afflicted

with warts, boils and tumors.

Wake up, wake up!

Its eyes stubbornly clamped,

it inherits careless mothers and cruel fathers,

like cold water in the face of the soul,

that it may through pure reflex

open its eyes, and see on the horizon

a glimpse of the home

from which all souls come,

to which they will, someday, return.

A stubborn thing is a blinded soul.

It has no memory of its memory.

It does not know

of the domain of seeing souls

who grieve for their lost brethren.

Won't you see, won't you remember?

they cry. To the blind

it is a faint and distant sound

drowned by the thunder

of clenched and blaming hearts.

Here it is, here it is!

Just open your eyes, just remember.

The glue that holds