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A few thoughts on “Verisimilitude”:

If I could make short films using my mind, I would.

And if we all had USB ports in our temples and could share those images, strung together by white cords, like two kids sharing earbuds on the bus, what then?

Would those images be a semblance of our desires? How terrifying or transcendent might that be? How tender or tyrannical?

Would our primary goal as creators and composers become receiving a knowing glance?

Applause seems an odd response to art. It stirs the air, then same old silence. Yet I love it when people clap at the movies, which can’t hear.

“Mellow Drama” began with the epigraph – a pronouncement I overheard a woman gleefully declare one late afternoon as I was walking along the Jersey Shore. The beach was already clearing out for the day, only a few people around. The sun was slowly sliding toward the horizon – that seam between sky and sea I’d had my eye on, hoping to spot some dolphins in the distance, as one occasionally does that time of day.

Both “Left a Refugee Here in a Sterile Country” and “I Have Gone Shimmering into Ungentle Sleep” appear in my narrative sequence, Fevers of Unknown Origin, currently making the rounds with publishers. Before this project, I had never written a book-length manuscript featuring one speaker and a clear story; however, I had often looked on those poets capable of doing so with wonder and curiosity. In fact, I didn’t set out to write this type of “project” book. Instead, the first poems in the sequence took shape one after the other, until they built a certain momentum, and I had to keep writing them.

The first Friday of every month, the City of Oakland shuts down twenty blocks of Telegraph Avenue for a night of street performance, open art galleries, and food trucks during which upward of 20,000 people, most smoking weed or drinking PBR tallboys, descend en masse on downtown Oakland. Known as the “Art Murmur,” the night is a kind of Bakhtinian carnival in which the rules of normal social interaction are suspended in favor, as Bakhtin writes, of “a special form of free and familiar contact” between people usually divided “by barriers of caste, property, profession, and age.”