Selected Works - January 2025
Untitled Phineas Newborn Jr. Dedication
1/23/25
You’re kneeling by the water in Memphis
in your chestnut tweed suit, cat-eye sunnies
by the water, or something sinking in the water,
or into the sepia of the water, just above the cab-
yellow print: THE PIANO ARTISTRY OF
PHINEAS NEWBORN JR. It’s a complement
to the misty lavender of the high-rise offices––
an unimpaired fixture, stretching their lavender
yawning-arms upward into the fog; a cream fog
as if stirred overnight by city-angels in the cloth
oven of the Mississippi. HERE IS PHINEAS.
And you are declared as such, still contemplating
in your creased and angelic leather shoes over
the empty banks of the pond, metropolitan dust
pitched across the rippling surface in a slumber-
hour long before you reached here, reminding
you of a left hand decisive over the ivory necks,
these little dust-heads, a lavender bank so absent
of the Seurat’s Sunday crowd in their anamorphic,
green fulfillment. I’m emulating you and the way
that you pluck your phrases from the little chalk air
hanging, between the towers, as it vanishes from
the rushing sight of a passenger in a taxi window,
careening, ninety degrees onto Beale Street, red
umbrella taken by the involuntary gusts of another
work-day. You’re held by something, Phineas––I
can tell by the patient way that you’re holding on
to your cigarette. Following that lavender smoke
over the water, where it’s quick and blending, up
and across to the other dusky shore, where––within
the shade of the poplar trees––an old man is rocking
his knees in the sand, spilling hot black coffee like
little sepia river waves, listening to the blues from
the window of a street-club as it crowns the morning
with I’m Beginning to See the Light. Maybe you are
listening, Phineas, wary, as if you can’t quite place
where in this morning it’s coming from–– but it’s so
floral-clear and sweet like some forgotten place you
heard about in a ballad, washed away by the dawn.
For Phineas Newborn Jr.
Untitled #5, 1975
1/29/25
To ask questions is to be distracted by point of view.
- Victoria Chang, Starlight, 1962
At first, it was only the linens of the sea-people over Gilleleje––those patient
and delineative signals of the pencil as series of parallel cliffs over the peach
of the great water. In channels, in scent of sugar-blown like oyster crackers
around my two feet in the shallows. Between us, I feel as though your kempt
and tasteful lines are nearly unapproachable. Does their softness deliver you?
Everyone arrives one day and asks, where are you bringing me? And you’re
stood there in your hardcore cobalt painter’s coat––all speckled with hopeful
white gesso like excitable stars––and maybe you’re scratching your chin and
thinking this is where I’ve brought you. The piece is the beckoning, faraway
place in itself. The ribbons do not indicate the mountain. The square does not
indicate the summer pasture. Instead indicate mathematics of sedentary hours
upon a blue and a gray. How do you distinguish them? Where does the peach
tremble before that ambivalent bar in stone? And when does it reassure itself
that its position is optimal–– when it has achieved the singularity to take you,
like wobbly hands, out of that prismatic dream and back into the room alone?
After Victoria Chang, Agnes Martin
No Place
1/28/25
In my poems, I am always leaning
reliantly on images. I will cease this
for it is the design of the photographer,
and not of the transcendental poet with
awakened sensibilities and no need
for vignettes or their colour palettes.
Let’s see: I am at the coffee shop, again,
but I will not describe to you its interior,
or which extravagant characters form
the coffee-line, or how this certain air
feels against the cool air of yesterday.
I will simply reveal that I am so content.
I will perhaps say something abstract to
represent this, like “I am one ever-restless
cloud first released by the moon across
the day.” Or, my mistake. That is an image too.
Haven’t you been seeing the coffee shop
this entire time? Didn’t you see the young
girl with the point-and-shoot pass through
our first stanza, representing the photographer?
Will the feeling of recalling her outlast
The memory of her appearance? Is it too soon
to tell, or was there never a girl? In the absence
of scenery, I am relying on you, now. Tell me
about your own sensation of emptiness and how
someone pacifies it by gossipping about the sun.
Author’s Note
In the past, I have never “compiled” my poems. Each piece would be isolated from the next behind a collection of unrelated notebook pages, or else tragically quarantined within its own document. In retrospect, this seems a foolish decision–– at least not one I realized would have such an impact on my awareness of my own trajectory. By returning always to the same location when writing, a body of work becomes interconnected with itself. It offers me––as the author––a portrait of my own tendencies, as well as some impression of my output (for lack of a less connotative term). This is how I will write for the foreseeable future.
My experience writing this month felt organic of newness. I reserved more time each week than I ever have solely to focus on developing my writing. I read more poets simultaneously than I have in recent memory, as well as three works by Kerouac in a study of his descriptive style. I am obsessed. If you are curious, here are some of the poets who have been inspiring me from January: Yannis Ritsos, Elizabeth Bishop, John Ashbery, Robinson Jeffers, Wendell Berry, Galway Kinnell, Sara Teasdale, Victoria Chang. I read three separate translations of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which has become one of my favorite pieces after it was introduced to me first in Abbas Kiarostami’s 1999 film The Wind Will Carry Us.
The first piece is an ode to the ever-charismatic Phineas Newborn Jr, one of the most ingenious jazz pianists of the bop and post-bop evolution through the fifties and sixties. His musical voice is distinct and captivating to me. The second is an ekphrastic piece echoing Victoria Chang’s ongoing poetic dialogue with painter Agnes Martin, while the third is a reflection toward my common reliance on image-based writing. Creating poems which confront my own artistic weaknesses and biases has been a particularly exciting region to explore. As the first of the year, I wish for this month to act as a precedent. For the first time I have brought poetry into my focus as a primary medium, and I want to dedicate myself to trusting in this rearrangement.
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