"The essays are a postcard from the two to three month trip of reading." Eliott Weinberger at Vassar
It is a curiosity of the moment that American poetry seems to largely occupy the inner world, is obsessed with the self and its perceptions and feelings and ruminations, writing what it knows more than what it imagines or wants to find out or what other people know.
I abandoned the first person, since I never thought I was that interesting of a person anyway, and let the subject guide the form. Some of my essays look like poems, some are more like narratives, many of them have the simultaneity and jump cuts of a modern poem. My only formal rule is that this is strictly nonfiction, meaning I never invent anything. All of the information is verifiable, in the sense that, no matter how fantastic, someone, not me, has believed it is true.