Apparition Poem #1180 in Scud

 Apparition Poem #1180 in Scud. 

Genius Loci (Slight Return)

The term genius loci is one I heard first used by Steve Halle twenty years ago in Henniker. I found it intriguing. What it designates- the guiding spirit or principle of places (rather than people or things)- is something that has animated a big chunk of my life, from Logan Square to Chicago to Plymouth Meeting. There is then, of course, West Philadelphia, and the poem Genius Loci from the Aughts Philly section of Something Solid has been rewritten as it now stands on P.F.S. Post. Jenny Kanzler now stands in the foreground, where she has always more or less belonged. Have I been, previously, coy? Slightly. Aughts Philly could make anyone coy. Babes. 

Mojo Thing #2: William Butler Yeats

 

The title Deep Wood’s Woven Shade is lifted from the brief, early lyric poem Who Goes with Fergus? by William Butler Yeats. There’s a sense of parallelism between Mondrian and Yeats in relation to this collection— as with Mondrian, there is a limpid clarity to Yeats’ early lyric poems which could be said to work as an antidote to the convoluted semi-obscurity of this group of Apparition Poems. With Yeats, raw sonority also becomes an issue— the sense of pronounced pleasure, in Yeats’ early lyrics, in the incantatory magic of strongly employed, strongly supported lyricism. Refrains and repetitions, in early Yeats, take and transcendentalize that the poems are meant to induce pleasure— in language, imagery, and the symbolistic system around natural surroundings (Glen-Car, Innisfree) which animate the early Yeats’ group. This, before a sense of social responsibility led Yeats to adopt a relatively more representative bardic posture, and thus attempt his own bid at being what I have called “consummate.”

Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Dresser in Lothlorien Poetry Journal

 Dresser,  from Aughts Philly, Something Solid, in Lothlorien Poetry Journal. 

Mojo Thing #1: Mondrian and Me

 

Twenty long years (almost), with the length of twenty long years, and I’ve continued to use images from the oeuvre of Dutch twentieth-century painter Piet Mondrian, on covers and in many key situations. The way I write, both formally and thematically, has little in common with Mondrian’s paintings— I employ abstraction, to make points and for other reasons, but much of my work is realistic, or at least grounded in realism. Mondrian, of course, is most famous for abstract work, which also sets him adrift from Abby, Jenny, and Mary. What gives? I gave some thought to this, as I picked yet another Mondrian for Deep Wood’s Woven Shade, and came to the conclusion that, led by my own subconscious, I use Mondrian’s abstract imagery to create a sense of balance or counterbalance, with or for the texts in question. The writing is dark, twisted, tangled, and often only achieves limpidity when focused on painful realities; the smooth, limpid clarity of the Mondrian abstractions allow some air, some sensory data against claustrophobia into the books as a gestalt whole. It’s a mojo thing, and a positing in place of another dialectic; my thesis to Mondrian’s antithesis. The readers of the text are left to synthesize the material, presented together. I would like to make the argument, furthermore, that the covers of Deep Wood’s Woven Shade and the rest, are meant to be active agents in reader’s assimilation of the books. They are not meant to be perceived as incidental in any way. In an important gambit, I have spent twenty years choosing Mondrian to oppose me, and to understand that dark, tangled writing could often use something, any destabilizing element, to offer an impression of textual well-roundedness, or to approach the consummate. That’s the synthesis I would most covet— a sense of being consummate. Over a long and short expanse of time, however, it will not be for me to evaluate whether that sense, of the consummate, subsists in these efforts or not.

P.F.S. Post catalog page

Grilikhes: Torment

Pogorelov: At the Train Station

Blair: Vielle...

Duncan: The Metallic Autumn

McCabe: Existential Clubbing

Graham: On the Banks...

McCabe: from True History...

Stefans: White Sestina

Wallack: The Stranger

Lundwall: Mangina

Halle: Waukegan

Deep Wood's Woven Shade: Apparition Poem #1208

 

You bed down in a sty,
squeeze out your mind
like a rag, catch water
(usually greasy) in tins,
mix them up (murkiness
is not undesired), add an
edge of cyanide (or gin),
yet you know all the time
none of this will do much
good, or anything at all,
most of it is destined as
bricks in no wall, thus
does the blood spill, but
when you heal, how you
grab the sun & moon places
you where chemicals beg
your brain for admittance—