I just re-read my previous two Medium posts, the one that ended The 366 Day Project, and the one from when sQualor // gLamour came out. In those, I talked about the experience of feeling like I had finally become a poet. I talked about magick and intimacy and the power of holding a physical book in your hands. I’ll try not to talk about those things again.
Last week, I wrote a first draft of this piece you are reading right now. I talked about how strange and disconcerting it often feels to be a creative person in the digital age, when we are all somehow expected to double as public relations / brand management experts. There was nothing untrue in it, but it felt negative. It didn’t dance. There was no uplift, no aspiration, in it.
That didn’t feel right. Poetry can be many things. For some people, it’s for saying the unsayable. For some, it’s for social change. For me, it’s always been about singing, dancing, mystery, curiosity, half-forgotten memories, pathways to other realities. It’s about Muses and Winter and the occasional grand staircase, sometimes bathed in light, sometimes the lone refuge from darkness.
Invisible Compositions, this book that The 366 Day Project interrupted, has been a long time coming. I have been living with these images, these other selves, for the last few years, long enough to gain and lose friends, long enough be a successful musician, leave music, then think about returning, long enough to tell you that I am not the same person who began this book.
Flipping through the pages these last few weeks, while dealing with life stuff, while trying to care for my family, while pondering the future, while missing the person who will understand these poems the most, I felt tremendous gratitude. The vocation of Poet is an honourable one, if not a particularly valued one in the culture I live in, and to hear and see and feel the things I do, and to get to write them down, is a blessing.
If you choose to read these poems, I hope you’ll do so with your heart. Leave your mind, leave symbolism and allegory and all of that stuff they taught you in school, off to the side. You don’t need them. And if you’ve read Esbat or s//g, and loved them, I assure you, you will love this one too.
Invisible Compositions. In paperback & hardcover from Luna Station Press.