One of the few poems that can be dated from this collection is “I Am Not Afraid of the Satellites,” from August 28, 2005. At that time, I was living in a brown house in North Portland filled with books that I had collected in the hopes of starting a bookstore. The title refers to the wave of paranoia about surveillance that was in the air as GPS was starting to be embedded in all of our devices. The poem imagines data being extracted as a rain that “flowers” (associatively derived from “flows”) upward to satellites in the sky. It contrasts the stationary horde of books that I had accumulated to the modern ephemerality of data collection, with some thoughts about mortality thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, much of this is lost in a jumble of imagery that often drifts down obscure rabbit trails in search of resonant phrases and rhymes.

These poems are often hermetic and philosophical. They play coy with their intended subject matter, rather than come out and say what they mean. Sometimes this was because I was exploring the impressionistic outlands of my subject matter and other times it was because I didn’t quite know what I was writing about. I was happy to capture a phrase that sounded interesting and evocative, even if I wasn’t sure what I was trying to evoke. I was inspired by language poets such as Lyn Hejinian, I suppose, but also by Delmore Schwartz, whose philosophical poems I enjoyed but did not fully grasp. John Ashberry and Mayakovsky were close at hand. I had Harriet Monroe’s criticism of Hart Crane copied on the folder in which I kept many of these poems. More than anything, I wanted to make poems that “reeked of brains.”

I was extremely keen on rhyming quatrains. I wanted to write these poems that were sometimes surrealist collages of impossible images and phrases, but that resonated in hidden forms. Read aloud, the poems are dense and disorienting. Listeners rarely pick up on the rhymes. Part of this was because I gave little or no attention to the meter. Sometimes I would stuff a line with more words than it could conceivably bear in order to fulfill the constraint of the end-rhyme. But it gave me a formal device on which to structure a poem, to build its images out of.

Around 2007, I put together a selection of these poems, laid them out for a chapbook. I was going to name it “Oh Dear,” after the poem that I’ve put last. But I never completed the project. One is not always quite sure when a chapter of one’s life is ending. In this case, my energies were directed toward graduate school and a new relationship. I believed that I was abandoning poetry. I felt some measure of disappointment in the fruits of obscurity.

I wrote most of these poems on a Royal typewriter. Twenty years later, I still remember the tactility of writing them. My old Royal is ponderous and slow. Its keys often stick. Writing at such a dawdling pace, one’s mind flits around in the very act of hammering out a word or phrase. I often changed my mind in mid-line and I became, perhaps too attached to my own propensity for constructing jarring thickets of opaque language. I loved lines that seemed too dense, too awkward to be poems. “Daffodil and Echo,” for instance, is a collage of angular phrases and repurposed verbs. I don’t remember if I had any particular theme in mind but the poem clearly works hard to resist coherence. “Antipastoral” and “Crash of Symbols” also challenge the reader’s tolerance for elliptical speech. In such poems, I remember trying to tack from one register to another in such a way as to prevent the reader from ever feeling confident they knew where the poem was heading.

More than anything during this period, I was committed to making experimental poems that resisted cliché and sentimentality. They are a form of impressionistic bricolage at the border of the unconscious. Looking back now, I have mixed feelings. Often, they seem too self-indulgent in their unremitting obscurity. But I also find the occasional lyric phrase amplified in its effect, when presented in the context of so much strangeness.