A long time ago, a friend of mine told me he could only write poems about “The Big Things,” which I always visualized as something like titanic, vaguely anthropomorphic blobs, wearing fedoras and loose neckties. But I know what he meant, and I find that in my latter years I am writing primarily about them myself.
My work in recent years has mainly concerned itself with Big Things such as Time: how our past infuses and informs our present; Perception: the fallability of our senses and sensibility; Truth, Language, and Meaning; and how these preoccupations manifest themselves in the trivia and ubiquity of everyday (and not-so-everyday) life -- aka The Little Things.
One favorite quotation/rule-of-thumb that I keep in the back of my mind when writing is, “Good art should elicit a response of 'Huh? Wow!' as opposed to 'Wow! ...Huh?'" (Edward Ruscha). I’ve experienced a lot of that response from the works of the marvelous poet Albert Goldbarth, who has been described as an “analogist,” an avocation I happily appropriate along with flaneur. The soul of poetry for me is in this revelatory juxtaposition of unexpected tidbits that illuminate for the reader the writer’s mind and, with luck, the world.
Another favorite quotation is from Proust: “The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would not be to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees..." Notwithstanding, I’ve traveled to Europe quite a bit in the last 30 years, evidence of which you will see in the poems, which adds to the frisson of analogies that keep my synapses happy.
- Published in Aeolian Harp
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