He's done 10 years in the software business, has an interest in chess, writes poetry and prose, works in a university (a creative writing professor) and writes occasional non-mainstream Formalist/Oulipo pieces, and he's roughly my age. On the face of it he's as close a match as I'll find.
Many of his pieces have formalist shapes while avoiding the standard formalist preoccupations. The 8 stanzas of "After the Bee" have a syllabus count of 999994 and a rhyme scheme of abacbc. "Again" is a villanelle. "Chasak" is a sestina. "Diversion has abba stanzas. "From a High Place" has looser rhymes, the pattern being abaacdcd. "Poem Without Words" is 5 abababcc stanzas, the first beginning
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An afternoon in early you know it has birds in it the time of year they're always writing about things grow the whatever shines. I'm sitting here |
which is fun for a while. I quite like "Tuba Mirum". "Poem Found in a Box of Indoor Fireworks" is almost light verse - quotable lines surrounded by padding. "Winter City" sounds like it's set in Cambridge, with ghosts and a relaxed pace - "My clock, roosting on a live record-player,/ shrieked its alarm each morning at full volume". "Power Cut" is 5 abba stanzas, easy going
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Neighbours are talking in the garden - we didn't know we had so many. Their voices crisscross, passing between hedges, as their cats do. Did you phone? And did they tell you what they told me? |
"Notes for Nightingale" is indeed that - notes about the bird, and notes for a poem. "Towards Midnight" is 40 abacbc stanzas, with material more often found in prose - e.g. "He didn't even look at the clock/ so perhaps it was true after all,/ he could taste time. At least he could drink/ half the night, which may be the same thing" (p.52); "The room seemed worn out, the walls/ scantily papered, the fabrics thin:// chair cover, carpet, bedclothes. Maybe/ people had lived harder in this room/ and it had room fatigue. Nobody/ could weave blankets so frail. And the bed/ was so tightly made that every time/ I wanted to turn over I had// to ask permission." (p.53). "Blizzard" is longer still - 30 numbered sections each of 4 stanzas, the rhyme pattern being abab cbc dede fef. Again the style can be relaxed - "How it began I don't remember. The beginning's shrunk in the past and/ the ending glides into the future./ There is no telling how it will end".
So were we separated at birth? I don't think I could have written any of these. I was impressed by more of them than I liked, and I liked his later book, Dragons, more.
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