Compositions

by Carissa Pobre
Everything’s Fine Press
2023

A book of poetry and essays that explores the limits of language when translating music. Read an excerpt here.

All art, it has been once said, constantly aspires toward the condition of music. In Carissa Pobre’s Compositions, such desire is essayed through a writing that takes music not only as its matter but its very form: words are let sing on the page, and yet in a manner that also exceeds the banality of sound. In doing so, it comes close to what really happens when one claims to be moved by a work of art: “the self [is] lost; language [takes] place… A playing not comprehensible but felt.” Something transpires in this rupture of a book, and nothing more than nothing can be said about it—a true echo, perhaps, of music in its devastating beauty.
— Christian Jil Benitez, poet, scholar, and translator

Compositions by Carissa Pobre proposes contrapuntally to Wittgenstein: whereof one cannot speak, let us pass over in music. An undercurrent of the unspeakable threads through this book that, in writing about music, attempts “the indissoluble gap between a language that sings and one that tells.” This is difficult terrain. And from her opening notes, Pobre troubles this further with measured mistrust in her own terms of engagement. Yet acts of self-implication, performed even through self-denial or perhaps self-sabotage, hold together a diligent practice to meet her material generatively. Grappling with the limits of what can be “rendered on the page,” Pobre’s work sublimates tenacious intellect and intimacy in homage to the great composers. It bears witness to the “imageless” and “inaudible” in music that, often pedestaled in public timelessness, nonetheless engenders the loneliest sensations of the listening body: a bloom in the consciousness, a wordless cry. Just as Beethoven later “pushed to the two extremes of the keyboard,” demanding that his music “shout,” Compositions discloses to us a subject which, while resisting confession’s conveniences, we may sit with in shared privacy—a life’s griefs and hopes we are not asked to comprehend in entirety, yet invited to hear in fullness.
— Joshua Uyheng, poet and social scientist

Formations

by Carissa Pobre
Self-published
2021

A book of 30 journaling prompts and essays to rekindle agency and artmaking during crisis. Read the author talk here.

A friend was in need of writing prompts. So the author crafted thirty and the several fragments that make up this, a manuscript – written during quarantine and on the heels of acceptance into an MFA program, at one point the dream of a ‘wandering back’ to writing, one ultimately passed on. For there must be something more than the ‘luxury of grad studies.’ Because there are more urgent matters worth thriving for amid the several we cannot ‘opt out’ of. Because we’re in Year 5 of this shit show – and Year 2 of the pandemic. And ‘maintenance is hard work’ but just may be – when not given up on – our only reminder of ‘the baseline of where [our hearts are] supposed to be.’ For what’s at stake is what can come still through ‘dispatches of interiority’: ‘kinder and more relational forms of community practice’ – just in their efforting. Dear reader. Thus, this. Let’s locate ourselves beginning here.
— Martin Villanueva, author of a pig was once killed in our garage