Michael Collier

He was an example of anti-nominal determinism,
though he was friendly in manner, kindly
explaining that my light headedness

My grandfather’s right eye was a frozen slab
of milk-white ice that light never thawed
and when he slept, the lid didn’t drown
the curse of its constant stare.

This was before the time of lithium and Zoloft

before mood stabilizers and anxiolytics

and almost all the psychotropic drugs, but not before thorazine,

which the suicide O’Laughlin called “handcuffs for the mind.”

While Wordsworth and Crane express differing levels of anxiety about the relationship of poetry to the materiality of the industrial and modern eras, Whitman expresses none. “I will make the poems from materials,” he writes in “Starting...