Among other things on this page I am going to preview some of the poems that are going to be in my new chapbook. The title of that upcoming work is After the Flood. The sum total of them creates an antediluvian tale.
These poems were all written in 2012 before my father died, and before Trump was elected. I was a new grandfather too, and four years away from turning 60. It is surprising to me at how prescient these poems turned out to be. I was certainly concerned about my father, and also about a world turned crass, materialistic, and a democracy already gone off the rails. The certainty of our own physical demise, concern for our loved ones, and the the world we live in are assuredly perennial themes. So what is new?
The floods are coming closer and closer together. We also have no ark. Where do we weather this storm? These are floods fueled, hyped up, and supercharged, by terabytes of our private data stored in the clouds. Floods that create great storms of civic, social, psychological, and spiritual disruption. Floods of unrest, uncertainty, poor governance, destabilizing technology, and hyperreality which relentlessly marginalizes humanity. Heidegger, Nazi bastard that he was, saw this coming. He was concerned about a world where technology enfolded itself around us while we deluded ourselves with the idea that we were still in charge.
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