Onomatopoeia (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798899902178)

This project began as a kind of experiment with arbitrariness. The idea was to select 30 words, more or less at random, and write 30 corresponding poems. After several rounds of editing, what's left are these 16. The relationship between title and poem is not fixed throughout . Some titles have unavoidable connotations or autobiographical associations (HONEYMOON, HERON, etc.), in which case the poems adhere very closely to the subjects named in the titles. However some titles are, in a way, blanks-words encountered in text, in speech, or out in the world that seem to have very little clinging to them beyond their basic denotative meanings. In every case, though, each title word is conceived of as an event, a happening in time that, like an onomatopoeia, names itself. If BARK is the sound a dog makes, my goal is to describe the dog.