Rotary Devotion was written during a long period witnessing the collapse
of democracy and the rise of fascism in the United States. The poems
attempt to redeem time by surrendering to imagination, trusting the
necessity of that process. As process, imagination changes as it
transforms object and subject. The instability motivates the language
within poems and between them. No persona is immune to this uncertainty,
any attachment can be sacrificed. Likewise, any word might be summoned
to the moment shaped by the grammar enough to cohere.
In this engagement, the guiding concerns are sensation of the world and
how best to love, the former to stay oriented, the latter to justify the
effort. Body engages world on behalf of imagination which regards the
two with suspicion but interest. However reluctantly, the body lives in
the world under constant threat, the sensation of uniqueness in the
individual a consciousness of the collective body's crisis as threat to
its own survival. What is imagination's responsibility? How can poems be
made?
Writing poems, fixing words, is a kind of death the poems themselves
consider. Imagination is the lively necessary. It moves through parts of
the world and absorbs what nurtures it--the stubborn genius of homo
erectus, remembered light in a photograph, music found and made, poem
after poem considered, eternal weather, imagining history as it happens,
what matters and what dies to other forms of matter.
These poems offer intimate companionship to the reader's own voice, twin
at times, antagonist at others, always a necessary and loving duet
sharing genius and awe beyond personal identity which imagination knows
as a barrier to love as much as an enticement. Irony is all the solace
some poems offer, other times it allows a deeper vision of unity that
begins where poems end.
