Michael Angelo Tata’s 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These poems herald from an as-yet unpublished collection called Carpe Florem; they make their debut through the magnanimousness of FRiGG.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.