Elephant: Part 1

I started working on my second collection of poems in the Spring of 2021, and I decided to title it Geranium. I was still in LA at the time, and quarantine restrictions were lifting like the hood of an overheated car. I was going out partying with my friends again, and the city was coming back to life in a way that felt symbolic and important. As I would later discover, major cities always feel symbolic and important, partially because of the raw scope they contain and partially because each of us badly wants our time spent in them to matter.

The original theme for the book was Katsushika Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, a collection of landscape prints that feature Mount Fuji from 36 different perspectives and settings. The most famous of these, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” has no doubt been bazooka-ed into your frontal lobe at every strip mall sushi joint you’ve ever been to, and deservedly so. It’s been labeled as the most recognizable piece of Japanese art in the world, and has no doubt continued to serve as incredible top-of-funnel for Hokusai’s estate’s financial division if that exists (it probably does).

Unfortunately for me, the forest-adjacent East Side was not hiding its own Mt Fuji behind its re-socializing horizon, or if it was I couldn’t find it. My hope was that Going Out still meant something to me, but instead I realized I was bored with drinking and still not great at talking to girls in bars. Furthermore, I realized I needed this theme too badly, and if it had been a sentence in one of my poems in college, my professor would have stopped me mid-reading and forced me to erase it. So I moved on.

2 years later, and Geranium is gathering itself together again as I’ve continued to write in the interim. A very dear friend of mine passed away at the end of last year, and while the collection isn’t about her, I would say that it’s about the intricacies of our own devastations. As it would happen, earlier in the year last year I started to get obsessed with volcanos, and during one of my Google odysseys I stumbled across the story of Robert Landsburg, a freelance photographer who died during the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980. When they recovered his body and his camera from the backseat of his car, these were the last 4 photographs he had taken:

Robert’s story was a reminder for me that we give our lives for the opportunity to witness something beautiful, and that these images were perhaps the truest representation of what I mean by love. Not because of the violence in them, but because love is grandeur with real teeth. It also expressed something that I had been trying to get at with the title Geranium. The language we use for catastrophes and falling in love share some striking similarities. Both of them might bloom suddenly, and both of them will change your life forever.

In tomorrow’s edition, Part 2, I’ll be sharing the first poem from Geranium, titled “Elephant”, and talking a little bit about writing bad drafts and then walking through the small, strange door at the bottom of each of them in order to figure them out.