Blood Vertigo

BLOOD VERTIGO, as words yoked, is a construct that carries a lot of connotative weight, the way those two extraordinary words work when bound together. With BLOOD VERTIGO, the oral nature of the poetry is not so foregrounded... what BLOOD VERTIGO's movement insists upon is what is both internal and hair-raising about the workings of poetry thru Time. This is a book that takes Time. This book insists upon Time being both now AND then, the way the blood of the poet records what is happening as a function of Time being experienced as a disorienting enjambment wherein composition is somewhat at the mercy of multiple coterminous consciousness streams. Most of the poetry herein is current to the last couple of years, while some of it hearkens decades back, to earlier eras of the poet's compositional practice, and the resulting contrast is both utile and harrowing. The poet is awake within that disruption, is awake TO that disruption, and will use such disruption as a palpable cumulative influence on both the flow of the book's contents AND on the line-by-line making of each individual poem... which is why there is so much variation to both the themes and methods the poems in this book employ. Time itself is the specific charismatic turbulence that the poet's Muse submerges his poet's Need to compose within . . . Honor that bloody, vertiginous Mystery, o Poet.

Some words about having spent my productive life as an open readings poet : I believed in excellence, but also independence. To come in off the road as poet, to stand before strangers and deliver able & excellent work, as a stranger in full command of the Office of Poet as I had come to understand that Office - not as a salesman for poetry, not as a guy who hogged the mic & blew his own horn, but as a practitioner, unrecognized until heard. Who then, having delivered what seemed most necessary into the given night of echoes & yearnings, celebrations, epiphanies, & howling curses, disappeared back into America's vastly abundant hide, having carried the Word for release into alert company.

It was important to me that I show up unannounced and unsponsored - but thoroughly authentic, no matter the neighborhood, the town, the region. I took all of America as my calling ground, or at least those overlooked and minuscule aural cauldrons of America where open poetry holds sway. Lost nights of remarkable resonance, witnessed by auditors of similar bent -- the gig was to get up and do the right thing, to give forth into ears voluntarily present a sounding of craft and passion both shaped and untamed, both brief and wholly to the point of the given moment...

A simple enough prospect, although to be perfectly clear, an exhausting one ultimately... I still do poetry aloud, but now I am my own ears-cocked stranger, and the wee hours is where I deliver what I'm carrying, mostly on my back in bed beside my sleeping wife, wording both new and old lays up into the darkness, unwitnessed save for the clung-to discipline of acute self-monitoring. -Ralph La Charity