Fiction
ISBN 978-1-933132-49-5 $11.00 US | $11.00 CAN 76 pages
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I
have no technical knowledge about Consciousness, and even within my
grasp, the
unread books in my library still
outnumber those read (and publications on the
subject are multiplying). In any event, neuroscientists, philosophers,
psychologists, and others from many fields have speculated so diversely
and
differed so widely, producing whole
galaxies of thought —especially in the last
decade or so—that I couldn’t dream of doing some sort of summary or
representation of all of the work. Nor was such a project ever part of
my
notions—far from it. Rather, on one illuminating
day in 1998, I culled from a
pile of accumulated articles two from the New
York Times:
[1] “The Conscious Mind is Still
Baffling to Experts of All
Stripes,” by Sandra Blakeslee (April 16, 1996) and [2] “Wondering How
the World
Will End?
Some Mordant Thoughts from Physics,” by Malcolm W. Browne (July 14,
1998). Thoughts of the eventual end of everything
swirled together with a
poignant sense of the end of all I—or anyone—had assembled in the way
of a
mind. So I wrote,
“Decades of consciousness/or at least memory
tissues/electrochemical compilations/complex skeins wafting… .”
I
have likewise not been careful scientifically to separate
“consciousness” from
“mind.” These metaphorical designations,
though themselves almost poetical,
nevertheless demand separation, and I was blessed early on to discover
Antonio
Damasio’s
The Feeling of What Happens:
Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, a work of fine
science and
of art at once,
wherein such distinctions are made clearly. While reading other
books or articles on Consciousness and Mind and gradually
producing these
poems, I returned repeatedly to Damasio’s electric presentations—and
with
gratitude.
So
in the way of poetical discovery, all these new works blended with
years of
speculation and study and observation, resulting
in what you have in hand. It’s
a small compilation, but I rest in the happy prospect there is more to
come,
should time allow.
What a wondrous cosmos we inhabit!
Buffalo, NY October 30, 2006
afforded the freedom to develop courses in American Postmodern Poets and thus to educate himself
about what has been most interesting in letters in our time. He studied briefly with Charles Olson at SUNY
Buffalo and feels blessed to have met and worked with so many exciting poets, known and unknown. T
he co-editor of *Drawing From Life: A Selection of Joel Oppenheimer’s Work From the Village Voice* and of
Oppenheimer’s *Poetry: The Ecology of the Soul*, he is the author of *Intermezzi to Divorce Poems and
Dinner Table Scenes*. *Divorce Poems and Dinner Table Scenes* continue to develop. He has recently
had essays published on William Bronk (in a collection from Talisman House) and on Robert Creeley and
Joel Oppenheimer (in *The World in Time and Space: Towards a History of Innovative American Poetry in
Our Time from Talisman House).