Jim Davis’s Comments

Many of these poems were written with two main thought-influencers: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Reginald Gibbons. While writing, Reg, a friend and former thesis adviser, was making final edits to his book How Poems Think. I highly recommend picking up a copy, if these poems interest you even slightly—or if you’d like to know why I like to include paronomasia (rhythmic pun) and “Russian rhyme” (influenced by Pasternak, Mandelstam, etc.) in so many of these. Wittgenstein arrives in my Tractatus-like suspicion of philosophical language (“whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be quiet”) and appears as “language braided / in boundless layers”—these formal and philosophical ideas serve as the filter through which I examine highly personal and creatively fulfilling situations, hoping for these poems to “[rise] up & [dance] a small ballet.”

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