Void and Compensation (Karaoke Genesis) by Michael Morse

February 13, 2015   Void and Compensation (Karaoke Genesis)   Michael Morse

Since when did keeping things to ourselves help us to better remember them? We need tutorials from predecessors. To restore what’s missing makes a science of equating like with like, or touching small pebbles on a larger mental abacus. We hitch a memory of order to ourselves: From rotating bodies in space comes wind, by which we’re buffeted, cooled, or graced; The sun warms both the sunflower and the angel with whom we might wrestle; We get some lyrics from a higher power and then we act on or for each other. In calculated reunions of broken parts, the latter must always feel the former, inherit both the track and the turn. A situation like an empty orchestra. And when we try to sing above it, intuit, and even in our singing are mistaken— if pitch is something sought and never pure, if latter sounds like something we can climb as opposed to where we find ourselves more recently in our relations, in time, having been left or starting our leave-taking— something happened—someone followed someone. Someone had. Even held. Our formers. We’re doppelgangers, saintly or undone; pick a song and listen for your cue. Here’s the void. Now sing some compensation.            Copyright © 2015 by Michael Morse. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   “Karaoke translates into English as ‘empty orchestra’—a portmanteau of sorts from the Japanese words for empty (kara) and orchestra (ōkesutora). I can hardly sing a lick and my limited range yields Karaoke choices that are more talky than sung. And yet I love the idea and essence of the act. Singing lyrics that we learn (or read) parallels what we inherit—as family members, as inhabitants and citizens of particular places, and as poets—from whomever and whatever we follow. What follows is a kind of genesis, a making in which we simultaneously borrow and add our own stamp.” —Michael Morse   Michael Morse is the author of Void and Compensation (Canarium Books, 2015). He teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City and lives in Brooklyn. Most Recent Book by Morse   Void and Compensation (Canarium Books, 2015) "The Everyday Enchantment of Music" by Mark Strand "Record" by Katrina Vandenberg "B-Sides from my Idol Tryouts" by Harmony Holiday Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006,Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.