Opening Arguments

I think there are four discrete categories which create for the reader a supremely poetic experience: lyric awareness, lyric voice, lyric truth, and lyric moment (which we can also call epiphany). I do not think there are any craft elements that cannot be subsumed into these modern, so to speak, humors. I think lyric awareness has its roots in the enclosure acts, or the gesture which precipitated the enclosure acts, as when the goodly magistrate notices, for the very first time, the wee beasties in the fallow tracks, and seeks to put them in a cage, and to put the cage into a cage, and so on until he can jail the face of God. I do not think at all about the lyric voice, letting it instead come to me naturally, as the voice of God came to Abraham, and filled his soul with murder. I think the lyric truth of a piece is akin to its weightiness, the heft of it, i.e. the more words a poem has, the more likely it is to touch on the author’s lived experience and thus be exceedingly important. I do not think we can properly celebrate an epiphany without considering the gifts of the magi as a form of primitive accumulation. I think the calls that come from mountaintops are the true gifts, offered so we can toss ourselves, unrepentant, like apples into the valley. I do not think any of these four categories apply to my poems whatsoever, which ultimately fail to wrap themselves in the gentle sheets of the aesthetic. I think the poem can at best form a kind of inner imaginary, like the garden of a small and mostly disused chapel whose anchoress has been forgotten in the walls. I do not think it can do anything to slow the (re)growth of nationalism, shift ownership of the means of production, or halt climate change. I think we should shoot and kill the rich! I do not think the simile is a sufficiently erotic experience.

Proof For/Against Dialectics

The length of my hand

Outline of the shadows of the objects on the wall

Which I can disappear for you

By rearticulating the light source

A question of motion

What running might mean today

A softness opens between your eyes

Honestly, honestly

Line within the surface of a line

Were I a Documentarian I Would Phrase It Thusly

I will be unable to dissuade my mother from plunging from the 5th floor balcony of her beachfront
condo into whatever it is that awaits below.

Nevertheless, I am given a bullhorn. By grasping the carrying strap, I can whip it around my head,
converting it into a rudimentary weapon.

The crowd steps back. My mother has thrown the contents of her condo beneath her: a painting of
a lighthouse, one IKEA dresser, countless glasses made specifically for drinking white wine. On the
edge of her balcony, she shouts something I can’t make out over the roar of the ocean.

The crowd steps back. In my mind they’ve congealed into some sort of bouncy castle. Some dumb
seagulls on the air.

I whirl the bullhorn around my head, in certain respects resembling a slowly dissembling helicopter.

In other respects I am simple as a nun.