To put it simply, this is lyric poetry, the lyric poetry of blurred identity. Like an electron lost in its electron cloud, identity in Geometric Mantra remains ambiguous, fluid, perhaps nonexistent, until sought after. Yet the poems are also a record of individual expression, such as it can be in the 21st century, a crying out in the dark, a minimalist representation of the movement of mind, an effort at release from the weight of historical convention and expectation toward a genuine individual expression.
In this way, individual expression is as obscuring as it is elucidating, the poem as window in a dimly light room at night where the reader lingers, where the writer writes. Perhaps, you see yourself in the window, and, in the reflection the flickering starlight of the other. Perhaps, you recognize the shadowy movements outside as the extent of knowledge, the strange confluence of materiality and abstraction involved in every act of looking, of reading, of being.
Without the above, the poems would just be abstractions, exercises in the arrangement of the materiality of language, giving pleasure only through the interest of their shapes. I have come to regard absolute abstraction, if such a thing exists, or, more accurately, to regard the effort to continue to create it as a futile activity. Through the above, these poems run counter to that futility.
January 2021
