Synkroniciti is honored to welcome poet and writer John Brantingham of New York with Eroica Zuihitsu, one of our poetry contest finalists. If you aren’t familiar with the Zuihitsu, it’s a Japanese form consisting of loosely connected fragments inspired by the author’s environment. The name comes from Kanji symbols meaning “at will” and “pen.” The pen moves at will, creating a stream of consciousness.
Eroica Zuihitsu takes its inspiration from listening to Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony in early morning. Beethoven originally wrote the “Heroic Symphony” in honor of Napoleon, rescinding this honor before it was performed, after Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor. It’s one of the great symphonies, still performed regularly after two centuries, evocative of glory and noble victory. John’s mind and pen take off on a flight of fancy.
“The stars were out, and Napoleon felt impossible to me. I thought about the stars in France in 1803 and how they must have shone. They must have meant something to those who had seen the White Terror and Red Terror of the Revolution. I thought of the way they must have seen the stars, how bright they must have seemed after that violence. I thought about the way Napoleon must have seen them, and how little difference that made to him.”
Napoleon, Beethoven, the stars, John’s wife baking bread, tyrants, and Betelgeuse’s impending supernova are woven into an elegant form, fragments smoothed into a cogent whole. Although wide-ranging, this prose poem returns to its opening theme, integrating all of the tangents and developmental material with a synchronicity that seems inexorable. At its core the poem is a contemplation on how beauty outlasts despotism, how the tyrant is less permanent than the stars, a Beethoven Symphony, or the smell of freshly baked bread, which always return.
Read Eroica Zuihitsu in Synkroniciti’s “Patterns” issue, Vol. 7, No. 4, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
John Brantingham is currently and always thinking about radical wonder. He is a New York State Council on the Arts Grant Recipient for 2024, and he was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been in hundreds of magazines and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has twenty-three books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction.