Writings on 16 Textures for a Lost Home

This project consists of a group of descriptions that one could theoretically use to reconstruct a particular house, made and lived in a particular way. The voice in the poems is one that oscillates between an objective and subjective voice, the subjective voice (the given speaker) usually being brought in the last line of the verse with a more prose-like register to address a personal relation to something previously factual and existing (so making it something living or lived, I think). Think of the speaker like someone who writes descriptions of perfumes for a living but can’t dissociate the notes of the scents from the people he knows who wear them. The poems where this is disrupted and the speaker starts in place and looks outward are usually the ones with more personal attachment. The descriptions are spread between items, events, noises and lists, attempting to give varying and filling textures of the house in question. Given the subject matter, a sentimental tone is impossible to not exist within the words, it is played with a little, but is firmly there.

I hope metaphor doesn’t come across too strong, it does and can inhabit the poems, but the meat and potatoes, the known scratches on the floor, the bags under the kitchen sink, are the seen/heard/touched impressions, and the truly felt impressions. 

I have been spending a lot of time with The Hundreds, by Lauren Berlant & Kathleen Stewart, and stole that register of describing something external, and then stepping into it as the speaker (and to a lesser extent stole its prose form too). Aside from that, there are references here to Frank Bowling, Bill Callahan’s Smog, and A.R. Ammons, the last of whom I have spent this Christmas with. Auburn is Auburn university, the jumper was blue.