Near the start of lockdown in the U.S., Rosanne Cash saw fit to remind us that Shakespeare wrote King Lear in quarantine. (I gather that’s an oversimplification of the effect of periodic outbreaks of the bubonic plague on theater, bear-beating, and other 17th-century entertainments.) I’m not the first to point out that no one really needed Cash’s trip in March 2021, or since; few have had the material and psychological resources that might sustain Shakespearean or Taylor-Swiftian levels of productivity over the last year, or a self-assured sense of its value.
For my part, Clinging & Grasping is as much literature as I managed to commit. I don’t have anything against the notion that poets might have “projects,” but this wasn’t one – or became one only on the occasion of pulling some work together to run by rob. Some material came from poem-a-day notebooks (the pages are small) I kept in 2018-9, but the intent and result aren’t diaristic; it’s all reworked, reordered, and combined with newer writing. The title sequence began to coalesce during a series of Zoom read-arounds with two other poet-musicians, Ted Reichman and Wendy Eisenberg; “Shutter Lag” was revised from a much older draft for an online reading organized by Tom Shad, with Ted and Mario Fabrizio. “Statists” is the only previously published poem; its Oulipean conceit made it an appropriately procedural/processual way i
How these poems came together is one question; whether they go together is another. The main principles of inclusion and arrangement had to do with achieving both contrast and balance between – for instance – verse and prose, relative degrees of abstraction and fragmentation, and differences in tone, register, or “voice.” I was particularly conscious of creating some kind of off-matching effect between the short, paired sections of the title sequence – a structure that came about partly because of the page size and Rob’s layout. But a concern with resonance – in the sense of the sounds things make in response to one another – between or among poems carries through the collection, perhaps because the stand-alone elements are so modest in themselves.
The contents were settled months before the U.S. election, except for one poem added at the eleventh hour that refers to its aftermath. Otherwise, some of the poems’ manifest subject matter – my parents’ illnesses and my late mother’s dementia, the town (Upland, California) and region (the so-called Inland Empire) where they raised me – comes from my personal life. I’m less concerned that it’s corny or parochial to refer directly to these matters than I might have been a few years ago. Somewhat similarly, parts of “Domains” slot into what I imagine will be a crowded field of plague-year poems, though that material is also somehow filtered through a viewing of Natsuka Kusano’s 2019 film of that name. (I recommend it; if anyone knows where I can see her first feature, Antonym, get in touch.)
As for the title, Clinging & Grasping is one common translation for the Sanskrit Upādāna, the Buddhist term for the forms of attachment that are the sources – literally, fuel – of human suffering. Desire would be another applicable term, if understood to include aversion, and the desire for things to stay the same. The solution is said to lie in awareness of the impermanence (“arising and passing away”) of all phenomena. This concern shows up in various ways in the poems – though once it’s on your mind, what could one write about such that it wouldn’t? I feel compelled to add that I don’t consider myself a Buddhist, even what’s now called a secular one, or a regular meditator, so much as an interested, philosophical rather than spiritual reader-in-translation of, mainly, Dōgen and Nāgārjuna. I don’t claim these traditions as my own, but the reading has been helpful; for the last year or so, impermanence has seemed worth coming to grips with.
