book 1 of these poems, "a poet's love," comes out of the schumann/heine dichterliebe mixed with p.j. harvey's album dry. poems got wrote along the lines of schumann's arc (in theory), while listening to the songs on dry (1 song per poem--basically).
book 2, "veronicae," is a re-exploration, pretty much, of the ideas of round 1: a retelling of the story, not of dichterliebe, but of round 1's dichterliebe-inspired stuff.
book 3, "the unpaved," is one step further removed. as the title might suggest, it's going down a road that doesn't yet entirely exist, but it's the same as the first two insofar as it's a road that travels through the same basic territory.
book 4, "prayer-within," is about something, probably. looking back on a turning point and looking forward, and acknowledging both actions to be kind of the same thing, isn't simple, but it's necessary.
book 5, "blank and full," is when i began to look at the bigger form-picture. i realized i need to write 12 sets of poems in order to truly turn their repeating titles into acrostics. the titles have no special value, except that the form makes them acrostacizable. the poems are like breaths, sustaining the structure.
book 6, "red earth," is written to the strains of an incredible composition by elizabeth kimble called autobiography of red, itself a setting of text from the ann carson book by the same name. there are 15 parts to kimble's composition and only 12 titles available for poems, but i'm not letting that bother me. the parts are not looked at sequentially.
book 7, "still life:" i tried to write the whole thing to the song "wildgeeses" off ida con snock, but was wildly unsuccessful. i thought i'd be able to control the repetition this way, but it didn't work. the whole thing broke away from itself.
book 8..."the tic begins." this is a lyric from a helmet song off the album betty. you are welcome for this information hour!
book 9: "arouse alive / a suffering" is from june jordan's poem "queen anne's lace," the second stanza of which goes, "You (where are you, really?) never leave me / to my boredom: numb as i might like to be. / Repeatedly / you do revive / arouse alive / / a suffering." because, hell, i've already abused the creations of artists from richard wagner to harry nilssen; why not add june jordan to this list?
book 10: the structure and sequence of restless mouth is in large part a coping mechanism--that's what keeps it full enough to sustain motion, like a sail in a very specific wind.
book 11: not sure why the titles of these things began to become quotes, but this quote's pretty much from cocteau's opium, a study of a cure that's almost as rigidly formulaic, in its own way, as this...body of whatnot.
book 12: "love is the great good use one person makes of another (daughter polly of the strawberry letter)" is, in some sort of line-ification, a quote from one of niedecker's jefferson poems. i had that book but i lost it.
i thought that the poems might arc back around, as the dichterliebe do, schumann's creation, from what i understand, of a man healed by suffering. the healing i drop into though is not an arc; it is a recurrence, a boundlessness--to feel the same pain over and over, but from a boundless angle, like that one creator's mask in hellraiser. i am a nothing, a substance only; it's pain that redefines me, a whole sanctity of it. schumann's speaker found the weeping flowers, and extrapolated wholeness from them; perhaps this is me doing something similar. even in darkness, something gets done.
when this restless mouth is done, i'm rewriting it, based on the organizational principle of one music album per book (often albums seem to arrange themselves into near-12's, which is convenient). i expect it to start out very similar, to come from the same 12 poems, and then branch out from there. the book names will be the same, or similar; the poem names will be the same. the image would be of a honeycomb, or a library in a borges story.
the poems are organized simultaneously in two ways: 1., vertically, in terms of their being sets of 12 with larger cycle-titles, and 2., horizontally, in terms of there being whatever number of poems that all have the same title. you can scroll down the page and read them top to bottom, or go to the "links" section on the right hand side of the page, and choose a title from it. i used to think this organization was fairly incidental, just something that had happened to make itself available, but now i think it's more than that. still don't know what it means, though.
the awesome image of the tiger above is taken from this deviant art page: http://northmansoatmeal.deviantart.com/art/Tiger-Painting-117868815. because it'e either the tiger or the ladies.