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a drawing in black ink of a bird beneath a staircase, with music symbols above
Miki Lowe

Revealed in The Atlantic in 2005

The poet Erica Funkhouser grew up on a farm in Massachusetts, and it was there—many instances whereas wandering via the woods—that she grew enchanted by language. She liked the music of phrases, “the sort of clang of them collectively and the sound and the playfulness of them,” she later stated in an interview. All through her profession, she has continued to explain, joyfully, the pure world, “the place all of the discoveries, wondrous or determined, come with out names.”

Sooner or later, although, she additionally realized that writing can fail to seize actual brutality. “The dangers are innumerable: sentimentality, over-generalization, over-simplification, distortion, and preaching, to call just a few,” she wrote in a 2005 essay on struggle poetry. The identical 12 months, she printed “The Pianist Upstairs,” a poem during which she sounds exhausted, uncertain of the important goodness of language and even of the chance that artwork can heal a lot in any respect. Listening to her neighbor play the piano, she’s moved by the way in which he expresses emotional fact with out making an attempt to wrangle it into phrases. However his music, she notes, received’t change something past the stairway the place she sits.

It’s a bleak notion. And but, as deeply as I really feel her disillusionment, I don’t discover myself satisfied that artwork is meaningless, or that music is “wasted” within the face of struggling. In spite of everything, the pianist upstairs impelled her to jot down a poem—and almost a decade later, the poem impels me to jot down this. The world stays a jagged place, full of injustice. However that injustice is no less than engaged, not ignored, by such cascading layers of listeners and readers. Higher for the echo of Brahms to fill Funkhouser’s hallway than for the hallway to stay silent, and higher for her poem to take the place of an empty web page.


the original magazine page with a piano painted on in black ink, with birds flying out of the top of the piano

You possibly can zoom in on the web page right here.


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Hector Antonio Guzman German

Graduado de Doctor en medicina en la universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo en el año 2004. Luego emigró a la República Federal de Alemania, dónde se ha formado en medicina interna, cardiologia, Emergenciologia, medicina de buceo y cuidados intensivos.

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