Most of these poems I wrote while traveling in Italy for work, January thru mid February '20. I'd often scratch rhymes in my journal while eating Nizzarda salads at cafes or riding the train between cities. The rhymes would roll around my mouth during morning walks and evening passeggiatas. Under low breath, I’d recite them to myself, coordinated to the clip of my walking stride.
I returned to the United States about two weeks before Italy entered lockdown, and continued to write and rhyme my way through the early stages of the pandemic.
PITH takes its title from one of my poems, and the blood oranges I enjoyed while in Palermo, Sicily. I’m drawn to the semantics of this word, but also its sound. On one hand, the unvoiced sound of it feels epochal—the sound of respiratory failure.
On the other, it feels emergent, like someone rising from the smoke of stuttered speech.
It is a tiny and disposable word, and also, a portentous word. Plosive and portable, a friend of thin air.
While constructing this book, I was reflecting on what it means to make an artistic gesture during crisis. Humans have always felt the urge to flip reality into a rose; to pivot towards prestidigitation; to make shit glimmer. And, to do these kinds of lyrical and playful maneuvers during foreign times or dark times without disrespecting or disengaging from the darkness.
An acceptable and mature amount of levity and romance and magicianship does & must exist when a void arrives, or when an apocalypse occurs. I don’t always succeed in levelling the right amount. The fear of being inappropriately excessive stops me from acting lyrically or joyfully. PITH is another attempt to breach this fear.
4/21/20
Credits:
Music heard in Won (order of appearance):
Sun Ra. “Island In The Sun (Extended Version).” Marshall Allen presents Sun Ra And His Arkestra: In the Orbit Of Ra, Strut, 2014.
Max Roach. “Equipoise.” Members, Don’t Git Weary, Stanley Cowell, Atlantic, 1968.