Author’s Note:
I really didn't know what to think about these poems at first, as they came in a group, perfectly complete, which is almost never the case with me. To add to that, my fingers kept typing "spaekings" whenever I tried to type "speakings"—which is the title that somehow kept pressing to the top of my consciousness like a trapped bubble.
But in addition to all this, there was something else, something altogether strange about these poems that I couldn't quite put my finger on. I somehow knew that I had never written poems like this before, but I wasn't quite sure what distinguished them from all my previous work.
One thing for sure: the poems were intensely speakable, more than anything I had ever done, despite the fact that I have always prided myself on the speech-like quality of my work. I had only to speak them out to see how perfectly they fit the pacing and breath of everyday, common speech. And yet there was something uncommon about that very speech, because in some strange way, whenever I read the poems or spoke them aloud, the voice I heard reminded me of the urgent, measured voice that had always risen up and spoken to me at critical moments of my life.
But there were still other things about the poems that were new to me. For one, they were instantly memorable, i.e., I found I could re-speak them as though they had been engraved on my cortex at the moment of conception. Peculiar things like this happen to poets all the time, of course, and tend to keep them honest. In my own case, I had the vague sense I had received a prophecy of sorts, but I had no idea what until several years later when my obsession with achieving a more speech-like written poetry accidentally pushed me through the looking- glass into the land of oral composition.
I realized then that the Muse had given me (in Spaekings) a slight taste of orality, a mode of composition in which poems are not only as intensely speakable as our everyday speech, but also, like the endless stories we tell each other, instantly memorable. The fact that these characteristics are not usually found in written poetry, (especially the instantly memorable) and yet were given to me in the form of writing, makes them quite strange beasts to my mind.
But unlike the secretive, double-headed beasts that stare out at us from our ancient myths, these beasts were mine. And, as I soon found out, they weren't about to go away when I closed the book.