I started the poems for my chapbook Livid Remainders in April 2020. In response to the collective isolation I began a practice of writing at twilight, letting my room darken without turning on any lights. Sometimes I had candles. I was working very little: I was an assistant for a graduate architecture program and the program was at the time barely in operation. Even when we started to work again several weeks into April, I would step away from my computer frequently and sit on my couch, mostly reading poems. When it started to get very dark, I would write. The goal was to start writing when the page was barely legible and to write until I could not see the page at all. I would do this daily, moving day-by-day closer to the spring equinox.
In late May, George Floyd was murdered. The series of poems froze in place as the George Floyd Uprising began—I felt a necessity to stop the series and let it fall away.
As the winter solstice neared, I began to write again. This time, I
would wake a little before dawn after the end of daylight savings. The dawn and
dusk ceded to the crepuscular, a sensation of dark that bled into the work. I’d
start writing with the page obscured in darkness and keep writing until it was
fully visible, illuminated by the dawn. The intent was to have the poems arrive
to me over the duration, preceding the visible, to let the unexpected unfold in
the work.
bark forth bare rippling
surge slows words
testing the soil for rigidity
in the swamp
recedes of noise
albumen, blood, green
thought breathing gaze
Some works I was thinking alongside: Brandon Shimoda’s Evening Oracle where he wrote right before sleep while staying with friends as he traveled. Choreographer and director Daria Faïn’s exploration of darkness through the The Anechoic Naad Darkoom, “a soundproof, lightproof space” in Manhattan’s financial district[1].
The title Livid Remainders came from “...in an upstairs room/ watching livid reminders/ it is the same” from J.H. Prynne’s Down Where Changed[2].
Writing at the start of the pandemic, my anger at the state’s dereliction of an obligation to care for the populace manifested unavoidably in all my poems. I experienced the darkness as tuned with anger: I would write these poems hearing at all times the ambulance sirens in Flatbush, Brooklyn. The delay in implementing a shutdown across New York City that spring meant thousands of avoidable fatalities. I was livid—it imbued the work and persisted even as I tried to follow the poems along other paths.
What was the continuing strain of poetry mutating under the conditions?
Was I obliged to “know” and “see” the pieces I was writing? A diffidence imbued
my undertaking. The poem refused its own luminescence. Was each poem a dream I
wrote in my tired and morose state?
a red box, a call, caw, cry
feathered edge descending of
me, silent and next
in numbness, cosmos lift
out silent materially
like a gauzy film, sticky
sense leftover,
I mixed all of the poems together so that it is no longer recognizable to me which poems are poems of dusk and which are poems of dawn. They all exist in the crepuscular moment—a time when many creatures such as bats, street cats, and moths are most active—these flickering works attuned to that strange threshold of darkness, elusive and migratory.
From Robert Duncan’s “The Masque”[3]:
Poet: And
where are we?
I can barely see.
This single candle
flickers—casts a
shadow
into darkness,
reveals half-forms.
Guide: At
Love. If you could see
With your eyes now
I’d feast
Upon the swimming
moon
As if upon
eternity.
You have a little
light
That shows a world
of darkness.
[2] Prynne, J.H. Poems. Blood Axe Books. 2005. p. 293
[3] Duncan, Robert. “The Masque”. The Collected Early Poems and Plays. University of California Press. 2012. p. 251
Geoffrey Olsen is the author of four chapbooks in addition to LIVID REMAINDERS (above/ground press 2023), most recently Nerves Between Song (These Signals Press 2022) and The Deer Havens (above/ground press 2020). He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
