This is my second book of poems. The poems are in their third to sixth revision, and I plan to abandon them into a printed book sometime in the next year. Below is a sample poem from the book and a candidate cover designed by the extremely talented Hunter Sharp. Both are subject to change.
The mind is a solvent.
It hurts.
Stapling the errors in my eye sockets to my brain,
this is us being here: walking the bike path, holding hands, wind and
light coagulating around us.
This is the scene where I wake up and hold you still asleep next to me.
This is how time off-gases from reality:
a cone of light, an imprint on systems by signals,
this small space where we say I-love-you
and are changed by it.
When I write poems I like to cheat. I give myself obscure and oppressively specific constraints to get words on the page, then I abandon those constraints and begin revising.
For the bulk of the poems in Vocoder, this constraint was to write a very specific kind of cento. If you’re unfamiliar, a cento is a sort of collage poem: you create it by pulling lines from other poems and rearranging them. On top of this I added the constraint that the poem’s stanzas correspond to the title: say the title was “The What of the Machine,” then the poem would consist of five stanzas of lengths 3 | 4 | 2 | 3 | 7. Lastly, each line had to be pulled from a poet whose last name began with the letter in the title corresponding to that line. Using the title above, the first stanza corresponding to “The” could be made by a line from Tennyson, a line from Ito Hiromi, and a line from Larry Eigner.
Written on: December 8, 2024