These end notes were included in the original chapbook from which the published book The Only on in the Room with White Socks was created. I am making them available partly for clarification but mainly to provide background about how some of these poems came into being or were adjusted for the anthology, and to give some hint about what the writing process is like for me.
p. 9. “Second Drowning” and several other poems in this chapbook including “Letter from Dubai” and “Deciduous” were poems found in old notebooks or journals but that I reread with new interest and thought belonged in this book.
p. 20. “Maggie in the pool” was originally the third section in a poem sequence about Puerto Rico that was extracted and expanded upon to a full poem.
p. 29. “At a Café in Montreal” was originally the middle section of a longer poem “Canada Triptych,” but that I think it works better as a stand alone poem.
p. 33. “City” was written in response to a poem by Bob Herz in his book The City. Bob the editor of Nine Mile, who had an encyclopedic knowledge of poetry, died in July of 2023. He thought the poem had potential.
p. 35. An abecedarian poem is one in which the first word of each line begins with a new letter in alphabetic sequence. This poem also introduces a sequence of the chapbook’s poems that are more experimental than I usually write.
p. 45. “Cento for David Simpson.” A cento is a poem that is composed of lines from other poems. In this case, the lines are all lines from poems in Simpson’s collection The Way Love Comes to Me. Simpson, who wrote about being blind, died in 2018.
p. 47. “Schrödinger’s Cat Again.” Denise March. a member of the Inglis House Poetry Workshop and one of the original editors of Wordgathering died in October of last year. (See note below.) Schrödinger’s cat is a theme in quantum physics that I seem to keep returning to in my many of my poems.
p. 48. “To Larry Eigner.”I was writing a review of Sustaining Air, a biography of poet Larry Eigner, for Wordgathering when I got the news of Denise March’s death. (See note above.)
p. 49. “Bar Routine” was originally written as an assignment on prose poems for a creative non-fiction workshop led by Minter Krotzer in Philadelphia in 2012, but seems appropriate to this sequence on experiment with form here.
p. 50. “mycelium” is an attempt to imagine the pathways that a poem following a mycelium movement might take. The idea came when reading Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life about fungi.
p. 54. “Ice Storm.” I have been using prompts from Diane Lockwood’s The Crafty Poet as a poetic seed bank. “Ice Storm” resulted from one of them as did “The Day Before I Died.”
p. 58. “Laurel Hill.” It is obvious from the subject and language that “Laurel Hill” and the second stanza of “Crocuses” cover the same territory, but I have included both because I think they result in very different poems.
