Constellations of Waking

Poetry. "According to recent star maps, the planet Saturn in its wobbling transit moves through such well-known constellations as Scorpio and Sagittarius, momentarily altering their configurations. Like those star-clusters in the night sky, this work is made up of data points and imaginary containment lines, now-times and prophetic moments. I hope that something of the passage of the earthly cosmos that was Walter Benjamin is figured in it. As I saw it, Benjamin's story, though far more heroic in every regard than mine, nevertheless resonated with some of my own experience at the time. I had started writing a few years earlier. ...I was also a wanderer of my own inner life. Later, as I came to read more deeply into Benjamin's work, the psychological intertwining and identifications, the blundering, 'the errant and hidden life, ' struck me as the very heart of his empowering empathy, his intellectual stances, his profound understanding of culture, literature and politics. More than with most thinkers I have encountered, Benjamin's life, the difficult and obstruction-ridden life, its unsettled quality, felt inseparable from his writing. My own experiences and this seed-syllable, this romance of Benjamin's dis-ease and uncertainty, was, in retrospect, what would ultimately lead to the libretto/poem of this book."--Michael Helle