foreground, blue jay on pine branch above it, green passion
vine-covered fence on left
Ashbery's “today it is possible
not to speak in metaphors,” Eliot's “gasworks” calling forth
the whole history of human thought
man in light blue shirt
reading Eigner's “footwork/skateboard/middle of the street/ between trees/sunlight,” its “direct experience of event
in its actual condition,” Zukofsky's “I” also the “eye”
curve of white spray blowing back from wave breaking
across channel, wingspan of pelican gliding above it
Author's note: HUMAN / NATURE is a 1,000 page book of poems composed between 10.19.02 and 7.14.05 (1,000 consecutive days!) which takes up where Portraits & Repetition (The Post-Apollo Press, 2002), REAL (Avenue B, 2006) and CLOUD / RIDGE left off. The book is a kind of ?´essay' on relations between things seen/observed in the world and how such things might be made (´transcribed'/'transformed') as works of written (or visual) art — the paintings Kandinsky takes up in Concerning the Spiritual in Art for example. Every poem has ten lines in four stanzas, with the outer two stanzas recording things seen and/or heard in the world of ?´nature' (the first stanza on each page ´looking' at things out the window here in Bolinas, the last stanza at things which I've seen out in the water when I go surfing), the two middle stanzas noting things seen or read/heard about in the human world (that is, things made out of language). Thus on every page, perceptions of actual ´real' things in the natural world ´frame' what might be thought or said or written or in fact made of things in that world — e.g., as ´works of art' or ´transcriptions' of actual, ´real' things/events/actions in the world, which I've noted and ´written down' in exactly such shapes on the page; likewise in any series of pages, the two middle stanzas on any given page, which write down or ´transcribe' facts of activity in the human world, ´frame' the perception of actual ´real' things/actions/events in the natural world.
