Foreword to Public Letters

I feel obliged to say that I don't consider the work in this volume to be very good. As Bill Frisell says of his own guitar playing, with my poetry, I do a lot of implying. I imply what I really mean to say, imply a certain state of mind or particular sentiment. I try to miss the mark as poignantly and gracefully as I can, but am all too certain I am still in fact missing the mark. My desire to reflect the fragile-precious way of things is far greater than my capacity to do so. Not at least trying, though, would be equivalent to not living.

Some older pieces have been recycled, reformulated, and reinserted in new contexts, but most of the poems included here were begun in 1996 and 1997. All were meant, from the outset, to be spoken aloud. All, in fact, have been performed at various venues throughout the Pacific Northwest. Some have won me slams. It should go without saying, but I will emphasize, all are "in progress" as well, with a few that are mere embryonic notions as of yet.

Though "One Night Out" is older than the rest, it still rings true to my ears, and it always seems like a decent place to start. It is one of the first of my own works that ever helped me, strangely, find out a little bit more about my own identity. It had reached something like its current form by 1994, when it was published in Emeralds in the Ash.

The Public Letters series of letter poems was inspired by the desire to get things straight and to speak frankly. As it stands now, the project is still a far cry from where it wants to be. I have yet to feel very good about it, but have included a few examples here because I think it is fertile territory. Some of the pieces lean more toward the letter side of the letter-poem continuum, others more toward the poem side. The letter-poems of Richard Hugo got me going on the series (the reader is encouraged, no, implored to seek out Hugo's tremendous work), as did the planes flying over the radio towers on top of Capitol Hill in Seattle. The poems originally appeared, set to graphic elements, as a poster show on the walls of the Globe Cafe, also on Capitol Hill.

I plan to develop Aspects of Sam into an extended performance-art work. Though performances of this group of pieces have met with good reactions so far, I have little doubt about the need for significant fleshing-out and refinement still. I will be performing portions of Aspects of Sam in the 1998 Seattle Poetry Festival.

Kurt Elling is a young jazz singer from Chicago whose multi-faceted approach I find inspiring. In a tune called Tanya Jean, on his second record, The Messenger, Kurt sings this:

For those who have heard it, God becomes a silence, huge and glowing, flowing from the deepest inner places inside of your heart. It's saying, "Go moaning and roaming, alone-ing, go rolling on the breast of earth. Report you, truly, all the lives that you see there, like a song growing golden ripe, like the wheat. Take it! Take this cup I'm passing to you. Drink it. Think it way down into the entrails of your being."

Within these pages are the partial results of an ongoing struggle to think the world way down into my entrails. What is here might not be exactly what I meant to say, or what should have been said, but God damn it if I don't keep trying.

Bellingham
04.02.98