I was delighted to learn today that my poem, “Government Buildings in Berlin, 2018,” which I wrote about here, is up in the latest issue of After the Pause. I’m grateful to Editor Michael Prihoda for publishing the piece, and hopeful that our country, like Germany after Nazism and Communism, can turn around and start going in a more progressive direction now. Although I did not compose them as a set, I’ve always felt that this poem and Dreaming to Updated Mountain Songs went together–both ekphrastic, both centered in a place, both anti-totalitarian, both looking to imagination in a time of incipient tyranny. So I was intrigued to see that Zebulon Huset, the editor of Coastal Shelf, which published “Dreaming . . . ,” has a piece in this issue of After the Pause. I look forward to reading his work and all of the experimental work in this issue of After the Pause. Perhaps it will further my understanding of “experimental,” which still seems to me a nebulous, though inviting, descriptor.
