Stay / Present

Abstract

A collection of lyric poems set to the rhythms of a thinking, feeling human being in an epoch when truly inhuman/antihuman forces are using increasingly sophisticated methods to steal our attention, which is our present. These poems participate in American pragmatism's ongoing projects of a privileging of experience over dogma; an emphasis on outcomes for theorization, i.e. the self-evident character of truth; and an embrace of formal heterogeneity. George Oppen wrote—pleaded even—in his paean to the bicycle, “Let us agree / Once and for all that neither the slums / Nor the tract houses / Represent the apex / Of the culture.” That is a useful statement for the aesthetics priorities found in this collection. There are also persona poems, elegies, and poems of praise for cities and nature. The poem at the book’s heart “The Mountain Elegy,” is an eight-part poem, and it is the book’s major achievement. The poem develops a staggered line. The gesture of the line, set off by an indent, is to capture distraction, an alternative, parallel, non-constructive thought process. Explored elsewhere in the collection, this line finds it ultimate articulation in the “The Mountain Elegy,” where the indented lines recall lines from a ghost book, The Mountain, and the flush lines articulate an emotional and imaginary present cantilevered against those remembered lines. The influences on this book are many. Creeley’s “I Know a Man” and Paul Blackburn “Brooklyn Narcissus” inspired “Hudson Runway.” Thom Gunn’s “Blackie, the Electric Rembrandt” is behind “Star Pilot.” Wallace Stevens’s “The Reader” is in “Diegesis in Third.” C.D. Wright’s “Our Dust” contributes to “It Would Have Been Assembled Elsewhere and Moved On Rails.” C.S. Giscombe’s Giscome Road, Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, and Lutz Seiler’s Pitch & Glint were near at hand for a longer duration than most during my writing. Ashbery, Clifton, Eliot, Olson, and Williams are in the groundwater.Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.)2030-05-1