About the Poems - MG
About the Poems
by Mike Gubser These poems are part of a manuscript entitled The Historian. Each came separately, and the collection cohered only slowly. The poems in the manuscript, including these five, explore common themes of personal and historical experience (foreign travel, direct and vicarious encounters with people of different backgrounds, regular self-doubt and self-scrutiny) and are linked by shared images and shapes on the page (geometries, maps, music scores). As these examples suggest, I write poems that try to capture a wide range of experience in content, image, and sound. The poems in this manuscript reflect the varied professional and personal experiences entailed in studying history, a pursuit that, in my case, seems far less orderly than the staid academic stereotype allows.