Constellations of Waking

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Poetry. "According to recent star maps, the planet Saturn in its wobbling transit moves through such well-known constellations as Scorpio and Sagittarius, momentarily altering their configurations. Like those star-clusters in the night sky, this work is made up of data points and imaginary containment lines, now-times and prophetic moments. I hope that something of the passage of the earthly cosmos that was Walter Benjamin is figured in it. As I saw it, Benjamin's story, though far more heroic in every regard than mine, nevertheless resonated with some of my own experience at the time. I had started writing a few years earlier. ...I was also a wanderer of my own inner life. Later, as I came to read more deeply into Benjamin's work, the psychological intertwining and identifications, the blundering, 'the errant and hidden life,' struck me as the very heart of his empowering empathy, his intellectual stances, his profound understanding of culture, literature and politics. More than with most thinkers I have encountered, Benjamin's life, the difficult and obstruction-ridden life, its unsettled quality, felt inseparable from his writing. My own experiences and this seed-syllable, this romance of Benjamin's dis-ease and uncertainty, was, in retrospect, what would ultimately lead to the libretto/poem of this book."--Michael Heller