Born in Dayton, Ohio in 1984 to a musical family, Eliot Cardinaux is a pianist and poet now living in Northampton, Massachusetts. Having studied jazz piano at Manhattan School of Music, as well as contemporary improvisation and poetry at the New England Conservatory, he has lived in many places and absorbed a variety of influences. He is the founder of The Bodily Press through which he has released the works of other poets and artists, as well as several of his own chapbooks, including, most recently, Winter Poems. His first album as a leader, American Thicket, was released in 2016 on Loyal Label, and features Mat Maneri (viola), Thomas Morgan (bass), and Flin van Hemmen (drums). He has since been involved in projects such as Odysseus Alone, Magpie, take me by the hand of darkness, Our Hearts as Thieves, and The Gown of Entry. His poetry has been published in Caliban Online, Big Big Wednesday, Hollow, Bloodroot Literary Journal, and others. Cardinaux performs and records regularly around the East Coast and in Europe, with musicians such as Asger Thomsen, Jeb Bishop, Mia Dyberg, Randy Peterson, Herb Robertson, and Kresten Osgood. His latest project, Sweet Beyond Witness, is an album of solo piano compositions and spoken word with accompanying writings and film, released in August, 2018.

Friday Dec 6th, we’ll celebrate the release Eliot’s new book of poems: “Around the Faded Sun,” featuring a solo piano performance and reading by Eliot, as well as a performance by his ensemble “Rockabye Coco.”

INTRODUCTION (Around the Faded Sun)

My last poetic endeavor, The Scaffold in the Rain, a collaboration with Sean Ali, used his paintings as a structure around which to hang my words. Watching them, reading, decay around his images — words that became the scaffold under which the work itself is felt to rise up — brought to mind a gothic steeple, which Osip Mandelstam described in his manifesto “The Morning of Acmeism,” as stabbing the sky in outrage, because it is empty. As Notre Dame burned this year in a Western uproar, a parallel silence was made clear in the face of otherness and — by apparent comparison — its seemingly quaint variety of suffering: the image of a Palestinian woman grieving, embracing and guarding an olive tree, whom settlers intended to uproot; or the astonishing number of species, not untold, but overwhelmingly unnoticed, gone extinct due to human consumption, waste, and neglect in the past half-century. The speechless interruption of the existence of these gone-unspoken-for-by-human beings — in contrast to the outcry afforded the Western cultural symbol of Christianity that is Notre Dame — was called to mind to me by Jerome Rothenberg’s poetic account of his visit to Treblinka, which he documented in his 1987 masterpiece, Khurbn — an empty field with a few picnickers, in which the stones were rowed — in its own sharp contrast to his experience of the tourists flooding Auschwitz during his visit there. It spoke of all that goes unspoken, unnoticed, and forgotten in dailyness. To Paul Celan, poetry existed solely in relation to the time when it was written, rather than in general relation to a feeling of Time. This todayness — its Meridian, its dated-ness — Celan spoke of alongside another aspect of poetry: its essential darkness. Mandelstam — whom Celan thought of as a brother, though they never met — called for a greater love of the ​existence of a thing over the thing itself. It was the survival of the word toward which he directed his own life; the continued existence of his poetry. These poems do not attempt to represent the poetic conditions of these two great masters; rather, they pay homage to those interconnected poetics, by virtue of their todayness, situated as events. These are my events, for better or worse. If a poem withstands the voice, I have succeeded. If one can pick up the flayed branch and examine it, after the way has been cleared by machete, then the poem has an afterlife. If there is a poise with which these words unfold, it is toward the unknowable: breakable, brittle, bare.