About the Poems - AO
About the Poems
by Alexis Orgera These poems, while not written as a series, deal a lot with the fear of loss and the need to mark said fear by spelling it out, whether as entries in a twisted dictionary or with an infinity symbol or by invoking the blues or directly addressing myself from the vantage of a disembodied “we.” I inadvertently stole Harryette Mullen’s title for “Sleeping with the Dictionary,” but this poem really did need it. Anyhow, I like how Mullen fashions and maneuvers language with, in her words, “the conscious regimen of dreamers, who toss words on their tongues while turning illuminated pages,” so I’m happy to evoke her poem here. I also reference a Wallace Stevens title in the same poem, inspired perhaps by his “maker's rage to order words…” I don’t guess he’ll mind. “Crevices” was written with my friend Rick Bursky. We’re learning that our collaboration is slow going, but we’re having intermittent fun. I like the last line, “always chasing Jubilation.” I don’t remember which of us wrote that part, but it reminds me of when I was a kid raiding the raspberry patch. Let’s leave off in the raspberry patch, with rattlers sunning underfoot and the sun lightly napping, before things get too serious.