un-becoming
Somehow nine years have past…nine years since The Lost Films of Theda Bara was published in Issue #30 of Fence. The time of its making feels immediate but that’s a deception: nearly a decade has past. I am not now where I was then. The Lost Films was an imaginative essay/fragmented screen-play of almost-erotica about all the things I love because they do not exist. It was a solid experimental inter-genre work that captured where I was then.
Nearly a decade, later, my themes are different. But they have found a home, once again in Issue #39 of Fence. Un-becoming is a pun and the title of a 100+ line poem. While procrastinating on the final proof, I made this Venn diagram to map the terrain it covers:
My old friend Orion makes an appearance (he’s also Come on Lonely from my concept album these fountains rare here). Editing the middle section, which smashes up astronomical facts (the start that will soon go super-novae in Orion’s shoulder) + our mythical projections onto the stars + impending planetary doom, made me appreciate Emily Dickinson for maybe the first time ever. Complexity in brevity. Ah, there’s something worth mastering.
Un-becoming begins:
Though I have spent night under stars drunk and not drunk abandoning myself to way-out universal wow
now the walk from door to yard feels epic embarkment drunk or not drunk as if wolves as if pestilence as if deranged men as if
my mind, unhinged like a jaw, might not shut if darkness swarms. ..
I am pro-the Fence mission and you will be, too, if you like work that deviates from the American literary norm. You can get yourself a copy with a Fence membership, at your library, at a Barnes & Noble or an independent bookstore -- if in NYC, try Quimby's, if in Philadelphia try Avril 50. You can subscribe to Fence here.
