About the Poems - TM
About the Poems
by Tony Mancus These poems all come from a manuscript I've been working on for a couple of years now called Captain Vs. I don't know really what much of my writing is doing until very late in the game. I could try to explain the impulses but that feels kind of cryptic and weird. So here goes: I gravitated to the notion of captaining—of this figure of a captain and ships and vessels—in order to fix something to the face of various shaky event sequences. Where a person finds him or herself in the present looking around at what all has accumulated and then he or she is hurtled into whatever falls or fails next. Characters trapped in their I-me-mine, I-me-mine. History is on, then it turns off around them. The captain figures ultimately fail and eventually so do all the ships and the greater world swallows all of our little things and spits them back up configured differently. I'm most interested in the claims these poems try to make and where those claims falter. How people think they have a handle on things and how those things change in the hands of the people holding them, and how the people themselves change. I am a person and part of that. I hope these poems reflect this.