What would your obituary say about you? What would you say there, if asked? Before you reply, pay attention to everyday stuff and your aspirations, especially what you love. Note as well how others see you. Besides, how do you fit into your neighborhood or wider community? Feel free to exaggerate, reflecting everyone else.
As a human, you assume a cluster of identities – some of them chosen and changeable, others immutable. My grandfather, for example, proclaimed himself Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber, invoking a host of other identities as well: Protestant, Freemason, middle-class, married. “Grandfather” wasn’t high up in his awareness, from my perspective. Being male or female or teenaged or elderly, on the other hand, are simply givens. And the history of what we’ve done or failed to do cannot be altered, except in our own perceptions and retelling.
The range of identities is astounding. They include but are not limited to race, religion, nationality and locality, occupation, family (household and near kin to genealogy itself), education and educational institutions, athletics, hobbies and interests, actions and emotions, even other individuals we admire, from actors and authors to athletes, politicians, and historic figures. They soon extend to the people we associate with – family, friends, coworkers, neighbors. And, pointedly, our phobias and possessions.
Curiously, it becomes easier to say what we are not than what we are specifically. That is, set out to define yourself in the positive and you’ll find the list rapidly dwindling, while an inexplicable core remains untouched. Turn to the oppositions, however, and the list becomes endless. I am not, for instance, a monkey. At least, most of the time.
Sometimes, moreover, a specified negative becomes truly revealing: “I am not a crook,” for instance, as the classic revelation.
Behind the masks of public life – our occupations, religious affiliations, social status, economic positions, family connections, educational accomplishments, and so on – each of us engages in another struggle, an attempt to find inner balance and direction for our own life. As we do so, we soon face a plethora of interior and exterior forces that must be reconciled. We get glimmers into this struggle – both within ourselves and within others – in statements that begin “I am” and “I am not,” as well as “I have been,” which recognizes the history and habits we accumulate and carry with us. There are also the voices – “he remembers” or “she insists” – that also recur in our lives, defining and redefining ourselves both within, as conscience or the angel or devil on our shoulders, and without, as any of a host of authority figures and friends or family members.
All that brings us around to my latest poetry collection, Hamlet: A Village of Gargoyles. There, many of the imaginary individuals profiled are identified by occupation while their confessions typically reflect the more intimate concerns of their lives – relationships, activities, even the weather. These are, then, overheard snippets more than public proclamations.
Hamlet, of course, is a small town or a village as well as a famed play. In this collection, the inhabitants are profiled in five acts of two scenes each, plus intermissions and intermezzos. They’re even exaggerated, the way a stone carver would in creating gargoyles and grotesques.
Listen carefully – especially when others talk of their romantic problems or other troubles – and another portion of a mosaic appears. This collection of poems builds on such moments, constructing a community as a web of each its members. Sometimes, a place appears; sometimes, a contradiction; sometimes, a flavor or sound or color. Even so, in this crossfire, we may be more alike than any of us wishes to admit. We may even be more like the part we deny. Our defenses wither. Our commonality, and our essential loneliness, are revealed.
Just think.
Having originally appeared in literary journals around the globe and then as chapbooks at Thistle Finch editions, this collection of poems is now available in your choice of ebook platforms at Smashwords.com and its affiliated digital retailers. Those outlets include the Apple Store, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Scribd, and Sony’s Kobo. You may also request the ebook from your local public library.
The move unites the poems in a single volume, rather than a series of ten smaller chapbooks and ten broadsides, and makes them available to a wider range of readers worldwide.
Welcome to town, clown.
Jnana's Red Barn 