| I think of poetry as a form of knowledge as well as a method of “knowledge laundering,” a term for which I thank Bill Marsh. * I recently read Joan Didion writing, “Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?” * I was a student of Don Byrd who exhorted us, ‘Poets, what do you know?” and who began his Poetics of the Common Knowledge pointing to a “fact of composition” he credits to Pascal: ‘the last thing one discovers when writing a work is what one should put first.” * I am so enamored by this process that I have a hard time stopping it long enough to stem the flow of any one poem, or set of. * So, I am doubly grateful to Lori Anderson Moseman, who will sandbag these poems, this time, for this salo(o)n.* She is also one of my favorite poets, greatest influences and is among my most trusted readers. * My friend and former collaborator Chris Funkhouser said, “Collaboration is my only religion.” (I think I dreamed he said that.)* While the work in this book, my poems and Sheila Goloborotko’s art, were created independently, the process of bringing them together for this event, relieved, for me, a creative isolation I didn’t even realize I was inhabiting. * Working with Sheila and Lori on this assembly was all learning, incense and no hair shirt.* When I moved to NYC, almost four years ago, I had to re-imagine all my intellectual expectations and emotional relations with physical and psychic space. * The manuscript Frame Works, from which these poems are drawn, is a result of that process. * I discovered, of course, that I had lived in 22 houses in 44 years (now 23 in 45) and that those concerns were not, in fact, new for me. * The poems finally are a culling from a thematic (what are the demands that space places on information and feeling, and vice versa?), which it seems I visit and revisit in everything I make. * The architectural intelligence of Sheila’s art and the porosity of Lori and Tom’s house and even of their lives, invite a new set of questions. |
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