American Thicket by Eliot Cardinaux

"It doesn't do to look too hard into this mystery, which is as far from being simple as it is from being safe. We don't know enough about ourselves. I think it's better to know that you don't know, that way you can grow with the mystery as the mystery grows in you. But these days, of course, everybody knows everything, that's why so many people are lost."
–James Baldwin
If Beale Street Could Talk

“My poems are meeting places."
–Thomas Tranströmer

"This sentiment is what I am all about. These poems are not meant to be heard alone. These poems tell stories, and stories are an art that comprises listeners. Listeners do not sit at home on their own. They sit around campfires, dinner tables, bottles of wine. They sit with others, and in listening to others' stories, the stories change. In telling these stories, I hope for the listeners to change them. How? In telling their own as they listen. Why? Because America needs to hear them."
–Eliot Cardinaux

Personnel:

Eliot Cardinaux – voice, piano
Mat Maneri – viola
Thomas Morgan – bass
Flin van Hemmen – drums, percussion, cymbals

Track List:

1. Thicket
2. Questions (to the Thought)
3. Omnipotent Dreamer
4. Angel
5. The Stranger’s Song
6. Interlude
7. Conspiring Psychic
8. Radio Dues

Recorded by Tom Tedesco at Tedesco Studios, Paramus, NJ, April 13th, 2014.
Mixed by Eivind Opsvik at Brooklyn Underground.
Mastered by Nate Wood.
Photography by Michelle Arcila.
Design by Espen Friberg.
Released on Loyal Label.

Note:

In the piece “The Stranger’s Song,” the line “…half-finished to heaven…” refers loosely to a poem by Thomas Tranströmer, entitled “The Half-Finished Heaven,” from The Great Enigma. The line “…where a stranger once stumbled upon himself in the music of the stranger…” was paraphrased from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “There is no name for us, when the stranger stumbles upon himself in the stranger,” from The Stranger’s Bed.

In the piece “Conspiring Psychic,” the line “thieves of paradise” was taken from a book by Yusef Komunyakaa of the same name.

All poems by Eliot Cardinaux.
Music on tracks 2 and 3 composed by Eliot Cardinaux.
Music on tracks 1 and 4–8, improvised by Eliot Cardinaux, Mat Maneri, Thomas Morgan and Flin van Hemmen.
All Rights Reserved, 2015.

Special thanks to Jade Wollin, Robert, Heleen, Annie and Emilie Cardinaux, Michael Tillyer, Isaac Luxon, Ryan Blotnick, Daniel Levine, Monica Frisell, to Eivind and Michelle, and to the band.

This music is dedicated to my family, blood or no.

Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1984, Eliot Cardinaux is a poet and pianist now living in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the sole founder and editor of The Bodily Press through which he has released the works of others, as well as his own poetry collections, chapbooks, & CDs.

eliotcardinaux.com