VAN VOORHEES, Roger
If with Insistence on the Tension Gravity as Intercessor a Future Interject

“We take a sonnet as a prompt to enter upon a way of imagining that is enabled by its count and musicality and compactness: its form is a call to compose one's thought-emotions out of its folds, and find one's way by its customs to made states of mind. It is therefore not a prescription to conform thoughts and feelings to the tradition of its fourteen line shape.

This book opens with a sequence of seven sonnets I call ‘7 Flints,’ because the insights towards which sonnets have moved me in my experience tend to come off as sparks— and also because it helps in my attempts at imagining another condition for doing all things related to my idea of a book, when I think about something like a sonnet as a tool. Sparks of insight behave at once as emotions and thoughts, maybe before going so far as to reify into either.

‘7 Djinn’ is a collection of prose poems opening from a next node in the book's sequence. As figures of fantasy, the Djinn give much difficulty in being placed: they dematerialize and reformulate between locations in an instant. One might even mistake them for accounts in myth of the conundrums in the behaviors of particles revealed by investigations into quantum physics, with bits and parts and their influences seeming to act in more than one place at the same time. With the prose poem is taken up a quivering of ambiguity as an instrument to sustain flows of reflection, where ellipses betoken presences that can only be experienced when an oscillation between poetry's will to opacity, and prose's efforts towards clarity, is conjured from that gulf between the languages operating on the mind, and the act of writing those signifiers by which we keep record of their influence.

I am hard put to offer a synopsis here of the book's third junction, ‘7 Things,’ because how does one define a thing? ‘7 Things’ is a collection of essays. These deal with occasions, materials, stories, objects, events, people, relationships, and threads of research whereby I have perhaps already answered my own question. Again and again and again the thing is not defined, for a thing gets made.”

— Roger van Voorhees

Published by Bauer Verlag, 2024
Design by Maximilian Klawitter
Essays / Poetry