Why
Transbliterations began in the mid-2000s after a failed attempt to translate Pablo Neruda and deciding not to worry about the original, only using it as a stimulus to write. Then my brother suddenly died, and the method was now a filter that let something through that could not be said directly. The first book, 170 pages of Neruda, got me through it. If you can’t turn tragedy into art, then tragedy wins.
Three months after I finished Neruda, I wanted the practice back and pointed it at Shakespeare’s love sonnets. Then my wife suddenly left me, and the love sonnets came through my brain as the opposite of love. All 154 of these poems were written in real time, over 1,818 days: from 841 days before the day I learned my life was a lie, to 976 days after it, with revisions up to 99 days later.
Why sculpture, and why a voice
Everything after the poems is another pass of the filter, changed by the years.
I am at best a photographer when it comes to art and certainly no sculptor, but the idea of searching the entire space of potential sculpture and one day bringing these poems into the real world has captivated me. Every line of a poem is a prompt and the resulting images and sculptures sometimes make me rethink the line.
The poems are read by a speaker who does not exist, a blend of myself and others, which lets me hear them as someone else’s, also helping me to rethink the line.
What this site is
The current state of something still being made. The poems are written but still in flux, the images are provisional, and the garden is a maquette for one that does not exist yet.