LUTE POEM
      The first manoeuvre to master in tuning
      the lute is to want without wanting:
      to wish without wishing, to fish
      and the hunt without fishing and hunting:
      to burst through the door, asking
      for everything, yes, and for nothing:
      to learn how to hope, not to hope for;

     to open the door neither inward
     nor outward: unlatch and unhinge
     and unglue and unmortise
     the door, returning the wood
     to the tree where it grew
     and the lock and the key to the barstock,
     the ingot, the slurry, the ore;

     and to take out the windows and pull
     down the walls and replace them
     with doorways and doorways and doorways,
     the jambs short and tall, the lintels
     and sills of different proportions -
     some wider, like octaves and fifths,
     and some slimmer, like seconds and thirds.

As a  tribute to next year’s Bicentennial Celebration of Mary Shelley’s creativity and her famous sojourn at the Villa Diodati, David Annwn has written a three part poem titled Diodati Dance Card. Mary Shelley’s Elisions, a poem from the sequence, is David’s creative response to Mary’s handwritten MS of Frankenstein. David senses in the excisions and elisions of Shelley’s handwriting, the conflicting emotion behind her words. He asks, “is the making of a striking revolutionary novel like the recombination of old memories (the re-vivication of dead hopes and fears)? Does Mary bring old dreams to life -some menacing and unwelcome. 

​As a calligraphic work, Annwn’s poem has invited an exploration between the recreation of Shelley’s handwriting and a visually expressive interpretation of the story she has written. The calligraphy and the poetry also draw upon music, in this case the work Mozart’s Don Giovanni,’ particularly the‘Final Commendatore Scene.  David had written that Mary and her husband loved Mozart's music and particularly this final scene.

       lexes instilled
       with cyclonic variegates

        the scape shudders
        with flashes and

        sails, their foundries
        circumvent

         the speakers,
         verbal yields

          to the struck 
          conductor, an eddy
          gales in after-images

as fragments
disperse

aerated
gold
rushes in 
spirals
through