These poems were all written in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, while I was working on my doctorate. Most of them were scrawled in a small notebook that lived on my bedside table. I was not, at this moment of my life, thinking of myself as a poet anymore. I was trying to become a professor but I retained the habit of writing impressionistic poems.

While there is still much experimental word salad in poems such as “Please Call” and “Speed Networking in the Instrumentalist Ballroom,” the hand-written notebook poems, such as “Night Lung” and “Often Old” are quieter and often more focused. In general, these poems process the overwhelm of academic analysis, urban life, and intimate relationships in an indirect, digressive style. They are cryptic but often more personal than the poems that came before.

The poem that I’ve put first, “Circumlocution,” investigates its own wordiness as a philosophical problem, wondering whether the overflow of language gets us any closer to truth. I substantially revised this poem in an attempt to develop the theme further but I appreciate the punchiness of the original, so I’ve included a photo of it. In general, I’m impressed at how my former self wrote these poems in one go, without crossing out a word, just an overflow of the unconscious.

I can remember those hot humid nights in Philadelphia. I would come to bed, tired but my brain still racing. I would pick up the small notebook and jot down a poem in an attempt to dispel various phantoms from my brain. Many of the notebook poems are thematic reflections having to do with beds, soothing evening cups of tea, the yellow light of windows from across the alley, the faint sounds of the city.

None of the notebook poems were dated and my estimate is that they were written between 2013 and 2015, though I can’t be sure so I marked them all as 2014. The earlier poems, such as “Not So With Fiction” and “This Not This,” were written in New Jersey. They carry over much of the obscurity of “The Moon’s Quatrain,” including the rhyming quatrains, but they also feel slightly more focused. “Puccini with Zinc” is about the health food store in Highland Park where the owner would hand out vitamin supplement samples in the aisles. “Agates” is the most personal of these poems. It contains several phrases adapted from my last memory of my paternal grandfather.