Michael Cantor – String Poet

Refractions

“A sentence is a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung,” — Robert Frost

A sentence is a sound upon which other sounds are strung –
a temple bell, an ancient gong,
a voice that owns the wind and night and cuts into the bones,
the agonies and memories of songs that once were sung —
a sentence is a golden string
upon which sounds are hung.

So much depends upon upon; upon the way it drones.

A sentence is a monochrome against which words are flung –
an unrolled scroll, a whitewashed stone,
a canvas primed for undertones
of what was known and what was seen,
the sense an angled view can bring
to clarify the stammering
a voice emerges from.

A sentence is a crowd of sounds that can be made to sing.

Michael Cantor’s full-length collection, Life in the Second Circle (Able Muse Press, 2012), was a finalist for the 2013 Massachusetts Book Award for Poetry. A chapbook, The Performer, was published in 2007; and his work has appeared in The Dark Horse, Measure, Raintown Review, SCR, Chimaera, The Flea, and numerous other journals and anthologies. He was also a finalist for the Nemerov (twice), Richard Wilbur and Robert Penn Warren poetry competitions; and has won the New England Poetry Club Gretchen Warren and Erika Mumford prizes. A native New Yorker, he has lived and worked in Japan, Latin America and Europe, and presently divides his time between Plum Island, north of Boston on the Massachusetts coast, and Santa Fe, NM.