About the Poems - RL
About the Poems
by Rebecca Lindenberg All of these poems belong to a manuscript entitled Hymn, which I began when Craig (Arnold) and I were living in Rome in 2005-2006, and have been working on in fits and starts ever since. I wanted to give some of these poems a form that was more conceptual than metrical – hence “Love, a Footnote” and “Love, an Index” are both part of a series that uses scholarly apparatus to talk about passion, physicality, memory. I hope these forms will help reveal an underlying harmony between “eros” and “psyche,” two abstractions that sometimes seem superficially incompatible. “Fragment (3)” is also part of a series investigating the open spaces in language, how poetry can capture the fragmentary cohesiveness of recollection, how our instincts towards what Lacan called Gestalt thinking inevitably fill in the spaces, make the broken whole, recover meaning. With “Aubade,” and “Sing me, lover, sing me, poet,” I hope those poems (as gloss, as fragment) give a sense that silence and absence and omission have genuine and enduring shape, substance and significance.