Posit (Posit, Posit, Posit)

The most direct influence on the composition of the chapbook Posit, released by Dusie Press in June 2007, was a graduate workshop I did at Temple University in the fall of '06. The workshop was nasty: a fracas and a half, in fact. Yet I got something concrete from it; the sense that the first person singular in poetry, the "I," was in perpetual need of interrogation and re-interrogation. The efficacy of language itself also stood in this line of fire. Nothing new, necessarily; Locke to Coleridge repeated these topoi, as did, among others, the Deconstructionists (being the most notable); yet offered to me as a compositional angle, I hadn't used it before. This, rather than placing myself naively into my own poems some of the time, as I was accustomed then to do. The poems in Posit were written towards the end of '06, into '07, just as Mary H. reemerged into my life. I talked to her about them while she painted my Ad-to-Abs portrait. Picked up by the Dusie Kollektiv, I got a useful tip from Sueyeun Juliette Lee about Linke Printing in Kensington, Philadelphia, and: voila! The first copies were mailed on June 9, 2007. As of 2013, I found myself bowed down by the rigors of suburbia and suburban life. Volo Coffeehouse in Manayunk, Philadelphia, was as good an escape route as any. It occurred to me, during one of my Volo sojourns, that the cycle initiated in Posit could be repeated, and fruitfully, the poems enabled to ricochet backwards and forwards. The second two thirds of what then came to be known as The Posit Trilogy were written mostly at Volo in Manayunk in '13. The master draft was completed later, and The Posit Trilogy, which included the second edition of Posit, was released as an Argotist Online e-book on Sepetmber 9, 2017. It was my first official book-length release since Cheltenham from Blazevox in 2012. Back at Volo in 2023, my re-visitation to the original 2007 Posit form was an act of non-vandalism about consolidating all the ways structure (even down to using Mondrian images as covers), however loopy, could be built into poetry, and resulted in Volo: A Chapbook, also from 2023, which doubles as Posit Part 4.