Artist Statement
This collection of five poems is part of an unpublished chapbook titled Variations. I have often found that there are different directions I’d like to take a given poem that has been sparked into being by a particular event or scene. At first, I thought I had to make a choice, that I had to develop the poem one way to the exclusion of another. Then I realized that it is illuminating to present the variations as a group, generally a diptych or triptych. In this sense, “From the Forest Comes the Call” belongs with the diptych, “Divining a Carcass,” but I’ve decided to present it as a stand-alone poem because of its special significance to me, and because “Binoculars” and “Beyond the Fence” constitute a natural pair since they are more fundamentally about personal relationships, father-son and husband-wife. “Variations on a Theme by Yeats” is my experiment to see how a poem can evolve from an embryonic state as haiku through its essential images and narrative skeleton in an open-form sonnet to a fully fleshed-out prose poem. I suppose the concept of presenting multiple versions of a poem as pieces of a larger whole stems from my education as a physicist—from quantum mechanics, in which a system can exist in many different states simultaneously.
From the Forest Comes the Call
How Little Time, How Long: Diptych