Daze

The poems ofDaze form a prospect on time-the passing of literal days, the ephemerality of the body, frangible memory, American speed, the crisis of late modernity.Daze charts out the periods of our belief, blending personally-lived experiences with wildly assimilative narratives which make up our blurred identities. Written as a series of series,Daze works out the demands of the diurnal by interlocking poems both discretely within sections and across sections. Challenging the moral entropy of the 21st century,Daze is as much a view of bewilderment and outrage as it is the beautiful or true expression of poetry. Serial poems, whether lyric or in prose, are the technical means of embodying this vision. Written as a series of series,Daze works out the challenge of the diurnal by interlocking poems both discretely within sections and across sections. There are three such sections-view,ink,bed-deploying a series of odes, calendrics, personations, textual deformations and possessive identities. As Robert Duncan's opening epigraph suggests, "my mind is a shuttle among / set strings of the music / lets a weft of dream grow in the day time, / an increment of associations hellip; the twisted sinews underlying the work." Pressure is placed on syntax and in form as a practical response to bewilderment. In this regard the poems ofDaze are tinged with the pragmatism (and texts) of Emerson, Dewey and Isaiah Berlin, as well as the actual and imaginative "instruction" of Hesiod'sWorks and Days and Virgil'sGeorgics. There is also, one hopes, some humor.