Ravi Shankar

I've always been interested in poems that are faceted like cut glass and under the molecular pressure of an atom - compact, dense lyrics that have nothing superfluous in the syntax, each stanza a taut steel string pulled along the fretboard of a miniature linguistic guitar. To that end, Moby Dick Abridged is a kind of pun on the great white whale of novels. In many ways Melville's masterpiece is the antithesis of a "tiny gem" - it was according to London Literary Gazette of 1851, "wantonly eccentric and outrageously bombastic." I thought that to distill that novel into haiku was a brazen and audacious concept and I was hoping in the piece to capture the mystical and ineffable nature of Ahab's quest, the way the sea embodies a kind of blotting out and self-effacement.

The other two poems come from a serial effort that will be coming out as a chapbook entitled Seamless Matter, to be published by Rain Taxi Books in Summer 2010 and with a cover by preeminent American artist Sol LeWitt. I began calling these poems which share as structural foundation four tercets and an orientation towards a phenomenological understanding of the natural and artificial world. I wrote 60 of these lyrics, encompassing animals, landscapes, manmade artifacts and sites. In some ways I was responding to Wallace Stevens' mandate in Description without a Place: "Description is revelation. It is not/ The thing described, nor false facsimile." These poems are in the tradition of Francis Ponge, Parti Pris des Choses ("taking the side of things"). I am playing throughout the series with the textual and sensual, so the poem "Hospital" for example begins with an allusion to Hippocrates, the father of medicine, who said, "what medicines do not heal, the lance will; what the lance does not heal, fire will." I hope taken together these neo-pastorals constitute a kind of cosmology that reveals more about the act of perception and how the perceived is thereby altered then about the (in)animate thing itself.