the small of July

excerpts from a poem series i wrote in my last workshop with rob mclennan in 2008 have appeared in the Windsor Review and most recently in Otoliths.

here's a bit of a statement for the poems i wrote in 08

state, me(a)nt

the small of july is nothing more grandiose than the small of things, like the small of the back, Emily Carr’s the Book of Small, a phantom child. what goes unnoticed or unheard. what is voiceless. too trite to talk about attempts at what? just living forward or still in a post apocalyptic era, submersion in popular culture as a replacement for caring. what about patterns. disrupt them w/ action, w/ silence. how does text fit or does it at all. words & nothing help, yet they are pervasive as cockroaches in a disaster. summer, the dead season where everyone disappears, how heat turns the brain to bogmush. & it’s worst in the city, wreck & dig of bulldozers, teardowns, tunnelunders, rusted pipe, ruined graffiti. everyone disappears to cottages & air conditionement ...abandonment. & yes the l word. (loneliness)

attempts to trouble the pattern of everyday language via juxtapositions, metaphoric hopskips, associations, ambiguities, wordplay


“if i think ‘I’ unifies
I lose,”
--Robin Blaser, “saphire-blue moon, once,” Pell Mell



Here in this city the letters are many and the days are many.
--Nathalie Stephens, the Sorrow and the Fast of It


“And then there is the return and the return again, back to the city, which loses everything...”
--Margaret Christakos, Retreat Diary

30. How is it possible that I imagine I can put that chair into language? There it sits, mute. It knows nothing of syntax. How can I put it into something it doesn’t inherently possess?
--Ron Silliman, the Chinese Notebook