Nightingales in a Stateside Zoo

Why preserve poems written 20 to almost 30 years ago in a contemporary blog?  This was the question I asked myself when I tried to decide whether or not to actually bring this blog into existence.  First answer—a personal & idiosyncratic one: I’m a completist.  My later poems are all preserved on The Spring Ghazals & The Days of Wine & Roses blogs, & so ultimately I knew I needed to dedicate a blog to these poems, the oldest/youngest member of the three.

Oldest/youngest—oldest poems, written when youngest.  & these are a young man’s poems & different in many ways from the poems I later wrote in San Francisco & Idaho; there’s more formalism, less spontaneity—or more control if you will!  Many of us have these characteristics when young I suspect; this must be what Bob Dylan meant when he wrote “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now,” tho perhaps he was still too young when he wrote that to see how true it is.

A brief history: I moved from Vermont to Charlottesville, VA in July 1984 to attend the University of Virginia MFA program with a Henry Hoyns fellowship in Creative Writing—a tad over than 26 years ago as I’m writing this; roughly, a third of a lifetime. 

A few of these poems actually pre-dated Charlottesville; "When Summer Broke" & “Dogs as Chorus to the Late News” were written in Burlington, VT (but revised significantly, I believe in Virginia), while “The Déjà Vu Villanelle” & "Hen-Woman were written in Chicago during a visit there in 1984 right before I moved to Virginia.  Two of these poems also were actually written right after my move in 1989 to San Francisco—“Asleep at the Wheel” & “Frankie’s Flight.”  But these seem more at home with the Charlottesville poems.

A fair number of these poems were published in “Timbuktu” & “Little Friend, Little Friend”—many thanks to the editors should they ever pass this way!

A few quick notes: the poems will post in the order they appear in the book itself, which like my other poetry books is available here.  The book is divided into four sections: "Mutant Heroes," "American Dreams, "New Arcadia" & "Advent"; each section will be labeled.  Once all 36 poems have posted, the blog will become archival—still available to read, but with no new content after the final poem.  Finally, in a departure from my general practice when posting poems on my other blogs, I will post a photo from my Charlottesville days with each of the poems.

The book's dedication reads as follows:

These poems were written in another world, in another life, & after many years they are finally “on the record.”  I dedicate them to the people whose presence made them possible:

Brittany, Christopher, Eberle, Eddie, Elizabeth, Jenny, Jill, Jonah, Keith, Lana, Lisa, Mari, Meghan, Molly, Priscilla

Hope you enjoy them!

The image shows an illustration of nightingales (Luscinia megarhvnchos  - Nachtigall) from Naumann’s Naturgeschichte Der Vögel Mitteleuropas  (1905).  The image is in the public domain.