by Nicholas A. DeBoer
III. My Project
During my final semester at Naropa University, I decided to take a not-for-credit course with Andrew Schelling on The Cantos. We would go, bit by bit, all the way through it. Each week we would have a page count to keep and one of my classmates would research a certain aspect of the thematic realms of the poem. Within a couple weeks, I had started a process whereby I would take notes in consultation with the companion by Terrell. The initial attempt to move towards an understanding of the narrative structure started to change. On the 3rd of February 2008, these notes became ‘image-notes’. They would operate as a representation of the watchwords, the rhythm(ing) of history and any conceptual framing I found of interest. Each phrase in my notes would be expanded and built into a new ‘image echo’. A new continent was being found, seen, given over.
It is not innovation that I seek, but a re-visioning, re-capturing, dialectically handling that tension in these poetics, redirecting the labor. I am an apprentice to 195,000 yrs of human relationships. I learn, change, draft. I had begun to turn the screws in, towards the poems. My day job was at a small bank in Boulder, Colorado where I wrote a rough draft based on the impressions of these notes. One of the particular problems was that the last book of Pound’s work was unfinished, with only a few pieces being completed. To offset this challenge, I found that a small Italian publisher, Mandadori, brought out a selection of posthumous canto fragments. This served to fill out this section and to set the stage for other sections that would need to be extended for the sake of the work. All totaled, the rough draft collected some 700 pages.
On the 28th of August 2008, I began drafting the first section. It would be a reversal of Drafts & Fragments, starting with my own creation of a 120th canto and moving towards 110. After two years, the first book was finished, 20 May 2010, entitled The Singes. The channeling was on, a fluidity set forth. It became an obsession, taking up all of my time. This would now be a 10 yr project as I would shape and recapitulate my concerns with the ‘all of it’ that is my life, the voices, the artifacts of daily and dream worlds, of the bedrock and poetry. It felt like a gauntlet roar made actual intention. The poetry would not be a hold over of mid-century nihilism, or modern day apathy, nor a rendering of word juxtaposition to provide forth a politic. The intent is that of a sigil, and ongoing investment into epic poetry, a reminder of my own life moving forward. It would be made with the dirty and sick, this sacred little blue dot of a planet.
I have lived with this completed section for almost a year, and in living with them, like an appendage, there is a sense that I have met them, finally. Now, as I begin, again, on a second book, I have a sense of sitting on the edge of a precipice. The space of the writing is more than just a cognitive process. Once I started to produce something, put it into the world, the change was available, inevitable. The gesture has to be enough, has to be an incantation, a will structure.
I am not so much interested in creating games or exercises that bring about phrases as shapes alone. The work I make contains a meaning, and although, I cannot promise to the reader that they will find the meaning I have instilled, one is prefigured into the text. It is not possible to make a reader see what I see, but I want to be active in giving as many hints, clues and pieces of the puzzle as possible. I am an autonomous individual, working collectively. I have a name and I cannot stand afraid of its ramifications. It is reasonable to assert that meaning is arrived at culturally, that any piece of writing has a trace, a thread, a narrative device. These things are, however, not necessarily within my control, as the shaping of any piece of writing is made of the many voices of the city, of the ghosts of previous generations, so many factors bore out prior to my birth, that actual entry into the world on the 23rd of October, 1981.
And being here, all these little years, I have found myself in desire of being part of the wave that is history, instead of utilizing history for my own ulterior purposes. I want a poetry that is subjective, bold faced, damaged and wild. I am tired of having nothing left. I want breath on cold windows at the base of the tongue; an actual human intimacy, shot harpooned from honesty and mess. I write of my small presence in the world, sharing with you the dependent murmurs of my love for you. A desire, a yearning to see your naked lunch and suffer with you. The dream, the poems of the body as actual, physical contact with the community, with the commons, with that untenable ideal of utopic pirate ships at dawn break. There is such love that I have found in these five years of being a poet, that feeling of such agerasia, such passion and drive that we do not have to feel alone. We have feet on the ground.
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