Figures of Speech (Poems, 2004-05)

Vespers #8: With Assorted Drawings

	    these
          		                    are
	          	      the
	gaps
		                where

	   n o t h i n g e x i s t s
    

   
	all things float!
   

    
	an environment for light—
	the universe
   

	a place             t     s 
	that builds  i                e  
	                                                 l
	                                                              f
    

     
        events,
	indents in time's experience
    

	a
		  r
				 	 c
    

    
	solid
	liquid
	gas

	plasma
   

    
	still,
	life
   

	a
	re
	tu
	rn
	in
	g     d
	r          n
	   o   u 
    

      
	          p
        t                  l
               s u n
        e                  a
                  n
        m                o
                  o
   

	wind
	fire
	water
	wood
	metal
	animal

	—earth

	morning
	midday
	afternoon
	evening
	night
	midnight

	dawn and dusk!
    

After putting out my first book of poetry I struggled to write, and the poems that arrived in 2004-2005 felt like ‘difficult second album’ territory. I didn’t really know what they were, or what I was trying to do. I had started to become interested in philosophy and metaphysics, and wasn’t sure how to reconcile this with my poetic impulses. As a result I don’t think these poems have ever been published, or seen by anyone before. I might have put them up briefly on ‘Deviant Art’ when I wrote them, but I can’t remember for sure (I just managed to sign in to my old account after 15 years, and it doesn’t appear that I did, haha).

‘Deviant Art’ is where I met Laurence Stacey, and we began what would turn into an 18 year writing partnership, focussed around haiku and haikai practices. More on this in upcoming issues of Vespers . . .

Speaking of me and Laurence’s writing partnership, I am excited to announce that we have finished the final touches on our new book, containing around 100 pages of haiku and haikai, and are now waiting on proof copies, to make sure everything is as it should be! Hopefully those will arrive in a 4 or 5 days, and we will be able to put the book out by the end of next week. It is called Before the Earth, and contains recent haiku, arranged by season, written 2018-2022, and some old collaborative haikai, written in 2012-2013.

The cover art is a reworking of some old drawings of mine from 2005, which were influenced by Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Reading Deleuze & Guattari was radically transformative for me with regards to my styles of thinking and approaches to art. The introductory chapter on “rhizomatic thought” (both/and, smooth, horizontal, immanent, connective)—in distinction to “tree thought” (either/or, striated, hierarchical, transcendent, categorical)—still resonates deeply with me some 20 years later, and has been an ever present touchstone for my shifting relationships with philosophy, politics, and poetics. I hope to write a few essays on their work at some point, but that is a conversation for another time . . .

Vespers

Poems by Dick Whyte, and other miscellanea. Explore the archive . . .