Forethought: Poems

The world stands up. The sentence points to something and is itself an instance of this something. The world stands up in the statement. Such is the nature of language, a natural occurrence, rising with the iris in April, the sandhill crane in September.

Written and spoken words stand up first in the mind - thought being another natural occurrence. Early hominids devoted enormous amounts of precious energy to evolving a neocortex, home of human thinking. As a result, mentation has become our species’ dominant trait. Most of us, most in the time, live first in a mental topography.

The poems in this book are instances. Each points to a world standing up before our thinking, before our saying anything about it to ourselves or anyone else. I hope reading them refreshes your experience of this world, as writing them has refreshed mine.