Out of Context: New & Selected Poems

The work in Out of Context is just that because the majority of the poems were written for artworks made in collaboration with my brother, the artist Joe Winhusen. Our process goes both ways in that his work, which may take the form of ceramics, photography or painting, may proceed mine or vice versa. The final results could hang in an exhibition and/or act as pieces for a book. Three of these illuminated books are included here. The Blue Chip City Book of the Dead uses the Egyptian Book of the Dead as a template for guiding a person through a few of the confounding complexities to be found in the systems of late capitalism. The selections focus on the biographies of three men in some way involved with the visionary poet/artist William Blake and his London. These creatives include the architect John Soane and the painters Samuel Palmer and JMW Turner. The second book, C. S. Rafinesque: A Field Guide, looks at the life and work of the early nineteenth century American naturalist, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, a friend and contemporary of John James Audubon. Rafinesque's writings contributed to Darwin's The Origin of Species and added substantially to the field of taxonomy. Finally, the poetry of Tafelmusik plays with the notion of a ceramic "plate" as metonymy, metaphor and conceit. From a well-defined clearing filled with expectation to the way people gather together around a set table, the plate serves as a point of departure for speculation and song. The "new", or unpublished, poems reflect on the interstitial minutes of the day - the brief moments between the schedule's namable events - when nothing of consequence takes place, but the psyche is freed for introspection. In Out of Context, these moments begin with memories of early childhood in the American mid-century. The poems examine a child's innate sense of the world as numinous. Misinterpreted and mistaken, refined or resisted, such early intimations linger, and they displace the otherwise straight-forward manner by which we experience adult conditions. They beckon us to a reality beyond the one defined by our five senses. The poems in this volume gently explore the niggling psychological or metaphysical intuition of this "beyond" as a question, not answer. As such, they return us to the activities and settings of daily living where we find the numinous within ourselves.