CONCRETE EVIDENCE: A COLLECTION OF POEMS VERSIFYING THE CITY is a poetry manuscript that contemporizes “thinking into the heart,” as the Romantic Period poet, John Keats, put it, and the forms used for such thought. As modernity started to unfold, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Romantics were inspired by their immediate and natural environment of scenic, pastoral expanses that served as the basis for versified meditations. However, CONCRETE EVIDENCE: A COLLECTION OF POEMS VERSIFYING THE CITY is composed on the objects of the urban environment, its inhabitants and their relationships, and it speculates, aesthetically, on how 21st century subject matter changes formal poetics.
The manuscript is intentionally funnel-shaped in that it begins wide then hones in on the specific effect of the city on people. It is organized in three parts:
1. CONCRETE EVIDENCE
The section, CONCRETE EVIDENCE, is a wide-lens poetic rendering of urban objects: transportation, garbage, buildings, work, people, sky, and pavement. It is intended to be a meditative treatment of the sights of the metropolis through observations that can be gleaned by any eye. The poems frame identifiable images in poetic forms and language to discover how each influences the other. How will the urban environment change rhyme, versification, diction and shifts in thought that are characteristic of the form, and what aesthetic choices can be made to satisfy form and function successfully—if this is at all possible?
2. VISAGE AND PERSONA
The focus of this section of poems is pointed to urban and suburban people and how their relationships have been shaped by their environment. How do environmental elements prompt the interpersonal relationships and resulting events that mark the profile of suburban dwellers? VISAGE AND PERSONA examines the urban environment’s effect on us.
3. SPECULATION
Writing poetry and approaching problems poetically changes me over time. The turn inward, that it takes to offer a quiet, thoughtful treatise, has the effect of making me the object of my own observations. How am I transformed as I walk through the urban streets, a breath away from all of the things that populate the verse of CONCRETE EVIDENCE and VISAGE AND PERSONA? Change is inevitable, and SPECULATION provides deeply personal, poetic insight into how my imaginative filters manage life’s dynamic streams of emotional, visual, physical and aural stimuli.