Selections from Absences: Poetry (2014) by Michael Aaron Kamins

Image by Rudolf Steiner (blackboard drawing)

Author’s Note

The poetry of Absences was composed in the manner of the experimental prose poem first mastered by Charles Baudelaire in his book Le Spleen de Paris(1869). Instead of 19th Century Paris, Absences was written in a Los Angeles hyperspace after the Millennium.

The original book*, written between 2012–2014, features an Afterword by John David Ebert** and was intended to be read alongside Ebert’s magisterial study of Art After Metaphysics (2013).

Absences consists of three sections or “structures” — LINES, GLOBES, and CODES — which are neurolinguistic tools for mapping and projecting the ‘Absences’ (or ‘being-in-Absentia’) as an onto-aesthetic phase-space in the reader/listener’s mind.

Absences is the first of a larger poetical analysis of the alchemical state of “Self” and “Space” in the seemingly closed horizon of post-historic hypermodernity where we all must learn to live for the first time — to quote critic and media activist Bifo Berardi — in a world “after the future” (2011).

I call this larger project “Transderivational Searches in Absentia” and compare it to Don Quixote’s farcical search for a “hero’s journey” (which is always the search for self-identity) in spite of a radically altered landscape — both mentally and physically. For Cervantes, it was the technical beginnings of Modernity that complicated Don Quixote’s search to surrealistic proportions; and for us it is what John David Ebert calls the effects of the “new media invasion” (2011).

Just like the poets of Cervantes’ time, we are compelled to rediscover our basic “metaphysical postulates”— or what remains of them — after the Sublimatio of electronic Digitalization whereby everything has been evaporated and turned into telematic clouds.

Clouds is the title of the follow-up volume to Absences and where everything presently ‘absent’ appears to have gone — if anything can be found at all. — MAK 7/26/17

*Note: Consider these “selections” an electronic supplement and not a substitute for the hardcopy book which includes additional poems and an Afterword by John David Ebert. Available here: https://www.amazon.com/Absences-Poetry-Michael-Aaron-Kamins/dp/1497523036

**Also: link for the recent video examination of Absences by John David Ebert. https://youtu.be/B5WflMFaNsU.