To begin ...

As the twentieth century fades out
the nineteenth begins
.......................................again
it is as if nothing happened
though those who lived it thought
that everything was happening
enough to name a world for & a time
to hold it in your hand
unlimited.......the last delusion
like the perfect mask of death

Friday, April 29, 2011

Extracts from “Divagations,” a Work in Progress

This is to announce the first online publication from a new book-length work of mine, “Divagations, a Work in Progress,” in the current (fifteenth) number of Michael Rothenberg’s Big Bridge. The poems presented are the first seven in what has become an ongoing series, but the structure, which involves alternative vocabularies inserted in the margins, is beyond my powers to reproduce effectively on Poems and Poetics. The Big Bridge version also includes fanciful drawings by Nancy Victoria Davis that frame and amplify the poems themselves.
     And still another Ebook publication, previewed here previously, is The Jigoku Zoshi Hells: A Book of Variations from The Argotist Online. Both this and Divagations are easily downloadable and welcome to me as an alternative means of publication.
      A version of two of the Divagtions but without appropriate formatting appeared earlier on Poems and Poetics.  (J.R.)

2 comments:

Conrad DiDiodato said...

Thanks, Jerome!

Wonderful to read new material of yours online

WAS said...

“That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” as Walter Benjamin prophesied. You chase that aura here through “broken blossoms” and “the march of time” but it’s a downward diaspora, moth holes not wormholes, with nothing to hold onto but the calyx that remains of our quest for the invisible. The dis-ease of creativity comes to mind, “always in search of other ways to be,” the path of the search ineluctably following the in-folding of the brain, not the spiral of creation.

It’s the fearlessness of all this that I like. Who has the guts nowadays to let duendecitos into their sentences?