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. In fact, the whole thing could look like this.
Tennyson, Alfred; Ulysses
Hiromi, Ito; I Am Chito
Eigner, Larry; Five Poems
Waldman, Anne; IOVIS XIX
Heissenbuttel, Helmut; Combination II
Armantrout, Rae; Native
Tzara, Tristan; The Approximate Man
Ostaijen, Paul van; The Murderers
Finlay, Ian Hamilton; Poster Poem
Tarn, Nathaniel; Lyrics for the Bride of God
Hejinian, Lyn; [But isn’t midnight intermittent]
Ekpe, Komi; Abuse Poems: For Kodzo & Others
Mutsuo, Takahashi; Monkey-Eaters
Alexander, Will; Abania & the Death of Enver Hoxha
Char, Rene; Leaves of Hypnos
Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung; Aller/Retour
Illyes, Gyula; Logbook of a Lost Caravan
Nezval, Vitezslav; City with Towers
Erb, Elke; Text and Commentary
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
trying to get away from dogs and people
in a cold flame,
I’m on my way to America.
Awakening details,
the shadow of a bench dissolving into white sand:
how many constants should there be?
Dressed up in useless metal puzzles
you watch
a green blinker | a red blinker | the rainbow’s hoop.
The light in the skull of the bird,
a likeness of something numberless:
I can’t picture now.
Poverty moved into my homestead.
(Life is a blizzard, it’s a blizzard, it’s burning)
like a premise or a scar
the purest harvests are sown in a soil that doesn’t exist.
Day recedes to darkness,
dissolving sky to lavender,
hardly a murmur,
only the compass keeping hope alive.
With fingers pointing upward,
with fingers that we lick to test the wind,
it’s pure word.
To perceive it is to realize it.
I used to pretend I was a hero.
Coward, I’d run from dogs and people and living
in a cold flame.
I’m on my way to America again.
Awakening details,
the shadow of the bench I used to sleep on dissolving into white sand:
how many constants should there be?
Dressed up in useless metal puzzles
we watch
a green blinker | a red blinker | the slivers of a dream made machine.
I saw light fill the skulls of the birds my cat ate:
a likeness of something numberless
I can’t picture now.
Poverty moves in and out of my home.
Life is a blizzard. It burns.
Like a premise or a scar
the purest harvests are sown in a soil that doesn’t exist.
Day recedes to darkness,
dissolving sky to lavender,
hardly a murmur,
only the compass keeping hope alive.
With fingers pointing upward,
with fingers that we lick to test the wind,
what we feel is pure word.
To perceive it is to realize it.
Written on: December 8, 2024