The Cadenza Letters (a selection)
In our reading period for Issue V: Cadenza, we received so many love letters alongside your stunning submissions. Your words made us laugh & thrill & cry, & we found such joy in getting to know the people behind the work, these souls who adore song just as much as we do. Here, then, is a smattering of our favourite notes from Issue V submissions. Thank you for sharing your warmth with us. We don't take it for granted.
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Finally, after so many months that it just doesn’t seem like a life without snow can be a reality, spring is here. Every morning, flocks of ducks and geese fill the sky with noise as they return to their northern nesting grounds, confusing and exciting my dog as we go on our sunrise walks. There are too few days of warmth ahead of us, and any day not spent truly enjoying the gifts of spring and summer sends me to bed at night, riddled with guilt.
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I love jazz the way I love empty riverbeds and I love my girl's morning breath and I love the street after it's just rained and I love all the foods my parents made me eat as a kid that I'd never eat voluntarily today.
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I really appreciate the opportunity to submit my work. I consider myself a lyrical poet, and music infused words is still very much music. I can tell you briefly when Music as a mystical and spiritual force first came into my life.
When I was a foolish young man (as young men are wont to be) in the army, stationed in Nuremberg, Germany in 1973, some buddies and I sped south on the autobahn one weekend for Austria and the Alps. Half drunk and high on hashish, crammed into a smoke-belching Corvair, we climbed and climbed and circled and still climbed a great mountain. Near the top, we stumbled out to a cloudless, starry night. We wrestled and punched and flung obscenities to the gods as we careened to the edge. There we stopped. And fell to our knees in stunned silence.
Below us, Salzburg lay like a glowing diadem on the breast of the earth. Although I’ve tried over the years, I’ve never been able to recapture the first moment when a boy, on the cusp of manhood, felt the grip of the profane and the banal loosen and give way to the Beautiful. the Lyrical, the Musical. Briefly, perhaps, like the image of a reclining woman in a young man’s dream, but no less eternal for its brevity.
I wrote my first poem the next morning on the back of a Stars and Stripes newspaper on our way back to our barracks. It was poor and is long lost. But I still remember the last line.
And we came down from the mountain wild to claim our lives like poetry and a woman’s heart.
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Once upon a time I was a trumpet player, and one of my solos ended in a cadenza. Long story short, I like to think I'm better at them now than I was.
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I'm sure I don't need to say it but I will say it anyway- I stand with Half Mystic through the controversies over the past few days. I admire a journal that is willing to stick by its ideals in the face of hatred, especially one run by marginalised folx, and even more especially one putting out consistently high quality work regardless of what's on the sidelines.
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I've been following what is happening / has happened in recent days with your journal centered in some tough and brave decision making for which I commend you and Half Mystic! I have been wanting to set aside time to read through my poems and find those that speak to and within music to send your way, and your public stance, courageousness and resolve inspired me to stay up past midnight tonight, finding poems that I love that live in the world of music, to send your way.
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Whenever I think of "cadenza" I think of that Boris Vian quote, “There are only two things: love, all sorts of love, with pretty girls, and the music of New Orleans or Duke Ellington. Everything else ought to go, because everything else is ugly.” I reckon Half Mystic is a third thing to add onto that.
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I am a third shift barista in Orlando, and those long nights mostly alone with my music (usually jazz, usually Mingus) feel a lot like driving empty highways. Sometimes when I'm driving I write, on my phone or scribbling on my steering wheel. I've sent you a couple of these writings. The first is from a morning when I was coming off a shift where I'd had a live jazz band at the shop, on my way down to Miami to visit a friend whose father was in home hospice. The second is from when I was living about an hour outside of the city, and I would go home in an exhausted trance. My job is depressing and dangerous and plays hell on my body- but it feels good to have my music, and it feels good to drive, and sometimes it even feels good to be lonely. That's the blues, as I understand them.
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Thank you for holding this, Half Mystic.
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