Originally intended as the beginning of a collaboration with another writer, Meatyard, My Neighbor
was composed when I first arrived in Manhattan in the fall of 2005, and has
been edited and worked over many different times in the past decade, often as part
of unpublished poetry manuscripts. During that time I was steeped in the work
of the Lebanese writer and artist Jalal Toufic and his many theoretical and
aesthetic reference points that I shared an interest in, including the Kentuckian
photographer, Ralph Eugene Meatyard. Meatyard’s work appealed to me since it
seemed to use photography as a means of visualizing the metaphysical, therefore
making the ‘otherworldly’ available through an ensemble of “aesthetic facts”
(Toufic’s phrase). Like other poems I was writing during this time, it also
became a way of mediating—albeit obliquely—ongoing geo/political crises, such
as the USAmerican wars in the Middle East, and widespread racism against Arab
subjects. Much of the poem is ekphrastic—a relationship anyone can see who is
familiar with Meatyard’s photographs—but with something else in the mix both highly
speculative and oddly New York Schoolish (see Hannah Weiner’s The Magritte Poems, for instance) in
excess of the verbal description of works of visual art (ekphrasis). Like other
poems I was writing in the mid-2000s, it also embodied a melancholy attempt to
understand my encounters with the world as a Bardo or state of transmigration.
Since the poem has been in a transmigratory state itself for quite some time now,
I’m relieved that it has finally found rest in print. –Thom Donovan, 11/2017
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