Smithereens Press Chapbooks 'Rain' by Maurice Scully | Página 15

NOTE
‘Rain’ derives in part from watching the outlines of flight of some nail-clippings as they land on grass. The
idea of fitting this action into a book of ‘dances’ (it eventually became the rain) occupied me for a long
time. Another element in the piece is a photograph of Roy Lichtenstein signing copies of his prints.* That
picture shows the artist among several tables adding his seal of value to what is to a large extent the work of
a team of master printers & sophisticated equipment.
This got me thinking on the ‘magic’ hovering around name & number. The absence of that effect in
embedding one’s own name into the body of one’s own poem, ‘forest/gully’, ‘for is/dully’, ‘for its skull he’
etc., makes for a striking difference in outcome. This in turn brought me to the idea of giving the rain a
competing voice as well as its graphic presence & sporadic murmur (repeated plosives etc.). It seemed
important too to let the tension come in from another language as out of another element staining the ink on
the page as it were by