gratitude is a multitude by jim leftwich
Friday, October 13, 2023 at 9:08 AM Jim Leftwich
Gratitude Is a Multitude
"gratitude Is a multitude" at first glance appears to be a book of fragments, which it is. But it is at the same time a flowing, which is fundamentally coherent. It takes place as a journey, or wandering, through an outside and an inside. It is analogous in some ways to Basho’s "Journey to the Deep North". Jim Leftwich’s poems, however, are not haiku, though they do often have a haiku-like aesthetic, interspersed with longer contextualizing passages.: Is the roadsign / loose oily purse / cannibals scratchy / zinc in curtains Venn diagram index / fact is fiction / fiction is finance / finance is fungible / focus group backdrop / fractal heads shrunken The book is a kind of meditation, focusing on the surrounding world/environment, and on the mind’s movements as part of that world: Thinkable rustling / dancing stories iterated / trampoline sitting Temporarily Guar gum / intentional spine / chaos stocking hat gremlin gestures porous / haberdasher perplexing / glittered horribly i muttering / Mumbling i There is an attention to the tiniest and largest details of place and mind, a phenomenon reinforced by the many photos, mostly involving water: which suggests that the world, and the mind in the world, exist in streams of change. Streams in which words grow out of words, in which thought is a movement of language, in which words exist in interconnected layers: cones Nominal / Comic iconic / macaroni Conical / Monadic Canonical nemesis Bucolic / Xeric Nematode Comedic Full disclosure: this is related to a process in my own work I have called "Transduction", which I only mention because Leftwich refers to it. Transduction involves explicit attention paid to the resonances in individual words and phrases: remnants slant ear / consciousness of / material multiplicity transduction (John M. Bennett) / Roots Grow other roots And rooms growing other / Forms Growing corms and / Cornstalks… This is a book created with extreme attention, and the reader will be deeply rewarded by entering and re-creating that attention. -John M. Bennett
$20 US
308 pp.
ISBN 9781938521973
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