When one makes a poetic literary collective, one doesn't concoct a book. Unless he's creating a verse cycle, each rhyme is a complete thing, a moment, an event caught, say, like a swallowtail with a net. The only condition resembling motif is the affective thread being touched and touching every transience to be held in equipoise, plus that more or less unique way each soul expresses itself. In effect, one could say, then, that this collection, Otherness, is that merely, "merely" understood as referencing the shape of a mind's sense and sensibility on a page. Each collection consists then [and always] of the latter. These poems are mostly those written several years ago, saved from oblivion by an assiduous rewriting, as if, in one of my more felicitous phrases, they were a re-casting of "the feelings from a sonnet's wings." The title, Otherness, can reference a river losing its being when it meets the sea, that limpid moment of an old man when he finds the young staring through him, the knowledge that those he loved, who loved him, are gone; that [rightly, perhaps] life now flows around him, like stone by cataract. The collection's title bears eponymous connection to its initial poem, and, if I'm to be [mostly] honest, there's much said about loss, though that just suggests both my own antiquity and the fascinating fact that we do, like the cosmos itself, create grace from the void of our becoming. That, after all, is a truth of enduring consequence to the world of letters and the spiritual longings of men.Men and things arrive at that place when otherness is taken, where a river [say] fed by a thousand streams, populated by prairie atoms, massif juts, the erasing topple of sycamores, all borne a thousand miles, becomes just an old, wound-out becoming, a thing to be lost into a sea, scattered, as the poet says, like the feelings from a sonnet's wings. If one may expand on Yeat's marvelous four lines, an aged man singing, and singing well, is coda of-and-to that universe from which he came, to which must be returned his gift of song. In a real sense, we are the cosmos finding itself, creation disclosed to minds, those chrysalids of perhaps in the holocaust of time's genesis. The otherness of selves, bifurcating through deltas of senescence, stripped finally of their distinctness, bequeath to by-and-by the baffling glories of their musics, as posthumous notes define, perchance, what eternity intended, or, if fortune merely, were an unexpected, inexplicable issue in one roadstead of the mythos, psalm or aimless wander of forever. Read more
