2019: I am happy to announce that my chapbook, “An Ecology of the Void,” has been released by Above/Ground Press. This is a project that has always eluded any strict designation for me — it incorporates poems, smatterings of theory and philosophy, and even fragments that mirror the language one might encounter in a manifesto. My goal in the work was to explore the affect of a materialist or Spinozist politics and the directive for critical distance in the face of mounting environmental and social urgency. It is divided into two halves: a cipher, and a series of “metamorphoses” in which the cipher is modified, analyzed and re-interpreted. This structure propagates a continuum of reciprocal feedback whose self-reflexivity is meant to resemble both the activity of political discourse and the perpetual processes of material modification that we find in the movement of Spinoza’s Substance.
Here’s a quick sample poem from the “Metamorphoses” section:
Sonic Metamorphosis
Let bloodlet meatflank rinse
its wet into bankless river –
haunchsweat to gather strain
in refrain amid bereaved lather:
set leaves/petals atop brick
and rub till plastered;
regret twigwise and clockward;
repent guise repent words; capsize
in esophabile in forced acid
of grammar habile in panicked
skidhammer till worse and
worse; to grouse for food
to grouse for love to
river-douse it to grouse
for digging to reach
an above and so to begin
and so to set out with
heaped speech like glottal hatchlings
to cheep nestbound for snitched insects
to snatch ourselves away –
to beseech to beseech to beseech.
The chapbook can be purchased for $5.00 (plus shipping) at the link below:
Ben Meyerson 