Cat Funk, photo by K. Fletcher, at the poet's birthday.

Statement of Poetics:
From A Place In-between



"I would have become a lawyer.
Run for political office.
Have children. Maybe a husband by now.
I would have read every bestseller and every not-so-bestseller buy now.
When someone mentions Odin I would know exactly what they mean.
I would talk theory and own a gallery and be in sync with the literary scene.
I would have seen more indie films and speak Italian and Tagalog by now.
I’d have two canaries and a cat by now.
I would not be in voluntary debt right now."



I learned too late in life (my early twenties) that I have a slow brain. Not any kind of disability, but that my perception is not where the norm seems to be. Slow motion. Everything is slow motion. My attention is devoted, too much, my concentration in a death grip. I don’t consider what ends up on the page as poetry. I have to get this junk out of my head some how and I have to do this right now. The world is too efficient for me. I walk slowly, I react far too slow, and I daydream as though I’m paid to do it. I wonder about my soul and the hereafter, because I can’t focus in church. I don’t go to church sometimes, because I will end up writing during the sermon anyway. I am not revolutionary, I am not reactionary. And this is not a record. I will spend a week thinking about only sunlight.

This is not a filter. Had I a more steady hand I would be a photographer. My poems are the steadied hand, the pens are the lens, the words are the grade and available light and focus, the images are close-up or long shots. I take pictures. The viewer assumes that there is a small part of the photographer even in the most relinquished photograph. I hate photographs of myself. They prod the knowledge of, too many, disembodied moments. I am not all there, yet. I am an amateur photographer. I take pictures that only mean things to me. I cannot justify their being, however unbearable, however light in my effort to conjure Kundera. I am already too busy looking at something else to decipher them. I shrink them down. I may blow them up. I explode them. They become mosaics of small things we don’t ever really see. Grass, a dead squirrel on a side walk without a culprit, people we thought we used to know, joy.

The passing of time is vague in my poetry, even when I present a real time; the actual moment I am trying to capture is all but a few minutes. More often there is a time in between time or world in between worlds. Gloria Anzaldua spoke vehemently of a ‘borderland’, these poems are the oasis of that borderland: fleeting, momentary, forgotten at the turn of the page; while a lingering of synesthesia is triggered again as I write again that same line, again the same image, photographs of the same object minutes apart. Claude Monet was a poet. If the work is a memory at all, it is a distant one, one that I hope burns the heart in the chest or weights it with boulders of color and dashes of déjà vu.

-A. P. Stone
April 19, 2005