Michael Angelo Tatas Comments
These poems herald from
an as-yet unpublished collection called Carpe Florem; they make
their debut through the magnanimousness of FRiGG. Rather than seizing
the day, I thought it would be a grand idea to seize the rosebud, as the seventeenth-century
Cavalier tradition did so beautifully. Seizing the flower means many things:
to treat each moment as a botanical marvel whose uncurling petals reach out
to grasp the day with velvet tenderness, to witness the flowering of space
and time
as they unfold, expand and drag everything after them in the heedless rush
and flush of existence, to flow and flourish with the strange epiphanies which
spring
up between otherwise negligible instants (although, of course, no moment is
negligible). To inhabit ephemerality is a goal of my writing, filling to saturation
each stage
of an environment in the flux of an incomplete becoming whose only goal is
to keep becoming. Precious seconds spent absorbing the animated performances
of
passers-by, enraptured sybaritic interludes interrupted by the pesty phone
calls of gossipmongers, impeccable hairstyles devastatingly chic but just on
the verge
of going bad: spots of time which might otherwise fade into inconsequentiality
are stacked, palimpsested, jammed together, detonated and forced to partake
of impossible conversations through the sheer fact of density. Cafés,
laundromats, houses of ill repute, promenades: these provide ideal locations
for the overheard,
the olfacted and the viewed to infiltrate an interior lyric, as the City’s
many agoras offer up cacophonous and visually dissonant impediments to the
seamlessness or smoothness of an isolated ego gazing upon an inert landscape.
Lost in evanescence,
these poems are my way of wrapping my tendrils around the textures and torsions
of intersubjective chaos in the grandeur of its multifariousness and the glamour
of its singularity.
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