INTRODUCING THE INTERVENTION...!

I still remember when I was one of those Mark Young surveyed as to whether he should create an online mag. Now, OTOLITHS has forged a special place among online journals and I'm glad that the Introduction to my last 2019 poetry book is featured in its latest issue--go HERE for esteemed poet-critic (and painter) Thomas Fink's essay but here's an excerpt below. Later this year, I hope you check out my book THE IN(TER)VENTION OF THE HAY(NA)KU: SELECTED TERCETS 1996-2019 (Marsh Hawk Press)--it will be my last poetry book for a while, possibly forever:

excerpt from Introduction:

"Barrios articulates the feminist disclosure of female power in “the Enheduanna poems of Ménage à Trois with the 21st Century (2004), in which “Tabios privileges the woman’s voice and even when she speaks of the man longed for—‘you’—it is from the woman’s imagined perspective…. What really matters is the woman imagining ‘you’” (320) and not the actual “you,” whatever or whoever that is. In “Enheduanna #20,” the sole poem selected for The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets, ... two opening questions compel a recognition of the speaker’s influence over the man as she seeks to fathom his prediction about specifics of his future subjectivity: “As you fall asleep/ in my skin/ will you dream?// Will you want/ you or want/ to change?” Then again, Barrios might be right that this “is from the woman’s imagined perspective,” since the speaker’s apostrophic questions cannot be answered by a “you” who exists, if he exists, outside the poem. After some questioning of herself, she returns to questioning him:

Will you bring the scent
of red roses
I left behind

in New York City alleyways
(or has that season yet to pass)?
In my eyes

will you see
Baudelaire's infinity
he defined as the "sky"

you witness repeatedly
on and in any painting
marked by blue sapphire, lapis

lazuli, indigo, turquoise...sky...?"