Broken Lens #11 and "The Palace of Light"

 

I’m pleased to have some work featured in Broken Lens Journal Issue #11, which has returned after a hiatus with its first issue in 18 months under slightly new editorial management, with Adam Stutz as Editor-in-Chief and Isabel Yi Jimenez as Poetry Editor.

I’ve been enjoying reading the writing by the other contributors, especially because this is a rare situation for me: my work is appearing in a magazine in which the names of every other writer in the issue are not names I've heard before (or if I have, I’ve forgotten).

Context in the social world of poetry always changes, of course. Processes of contextualization and decontextualization always go on together, although my sense is that social media has changed things, maybe making new contexts come together and go away more rapidly than they used to. My own decontextualization might be more rapid too living in a place like San Diego, which has some local communities of poets but mostly not ones with much connection to contexts outside themselves.

Of course, one has to work to make connection, while being decontextualized doesn’t always require taking any action at all.

Is it fun or disconcerting to be “out of context" (which is always, of course, being in a new context again)? A bit of both, I think.

My work in the magazine is the opening pages of my prose poem “The Palace of Light,” which is from Book 21 of The End of America poems. Book 21’s title is Palace of Light, Pit of Virus. “The Palace of Light” was originally composed between September 2019 and March 2020. It was in the process of winding itself down in February and March 2020 when, for the obvious reason, it was over. The multi-part conglomeration "Pit of Virus" began to be written some months later.

And here’s a link directly to my work, which also contains a brief audio recording of me reading some of the material in the poem.