Epistrophy

Epistrophy is a serial work comprising seventy poems that explore poetics in light of its resistance to an authoritarian State. At present, with humanity's future in doubt, we may be facing the end of history, which can only cast its backward glances because it believes in the future. Meanwhile, the current regime employs widespread chaos to mask its repressive endgame. But, if history ends with no future to speak of, where can we look for a guarantor of meaning, especially the meaning of existence?

        Epistrophy argues that "The gift of life is the search for meaning, / not the presumption that meaning exists." Many of these poems cast poetics and the State as antagonists in our struggle for a democratic society. While the emphasis throughout is on poetics, there are passages dealing with the current regime. "Those who choose to ignore bad history / are destined to make even more of it." The practice of poetry exemplifies a peaceable alternative to state-sponsored violence and repression. To the gross if constant abuse of language - which degrades the commons and stunts public speech - poems are built on their material base and the diction best suited to tell the truth. No time for a tyrant's lies. Rather, poems function as credibility-discerning-and -affirming structures, designed, as Blake says, to cast out falsehood forever.

        Epistrophy is also the title of the Thelonious Monk composition I was listening to when I first began work on this book. The tune's verses, with their midline caesurae, made me think of couplets. ... Best to read slowly - and aloud, because sound and rhythm influence how a given line or sentence becomes available to meaning. Yet "Critics disdain what escapes them" leading to "another death by interpretation." In other words, does the total syntax of the poem support whatever claims you make for it? Once a book is in your hands, it is truly "in your hands." For my part, I try to translate my thoughts as clearly as possible within the constraints of the work under construction.

        Epistrophy, as I noted earlier, is a serial work. The poems in the series are linked by their internal logic as well as chronology. The book is the sum of the resonances that result. To grand narratives I prefer to focus on the thoughts that arise in the course of daily life. In the end, my hope for my readers is that they make these poems their own. That comes from repeated readings, which I encourage by writing to be re-read.