Remembrances: Boxing Backwards

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“Boxing Backwards” is the title that I gave to a collection of my poems, mostly composed after my move from New York City to Ohio in the early 1990s. The words are taken from a line in a poem, (to which I link you here) which I ended up not including in the collection. It was not that I felt that the poem didn’t work. Its exclusion was based upon my decision that the tortured syntax and neologistic compounds used in the poem (originally titled “In Retrospect: 1994”) clashed with the style of the bulk of the works. Structurally, this poem is an example of an experimental form that I created and used in the composition of a dozen or so other poems which were included in the collection. Its form is based on a strict linear syllable count, repeated in two stanzas of twelve lines each. The syllable count forces word choice and presents the poet with interesting problems of creative composition.

The term “boxing backwards” functions for me on a couple of different levels of meaning. In a pugilistic sense, if one finds that life is landing a series of sharp jabs to one’s chin, while one flails ineffectively, unable either to counterpunch or to mount a defense, one is soon on the retreat—“boxing backwards” into the ropes. On a more immediate level, with reference to the afore-mentioned move from NYC to Ohio, “boxing backwards” suggests the unpacking of the corrugated cardboard boxes into which the treasures and detritus of the life one has left behind had been packed for the move. As one opens the boxes and digs down through layers of documents and other items, one travels “backwards” through time and the boxes, deluged by memories of things past.

As I stated at the conclusion of a recent post, having become increasingly dissatisfied with dissecting the present world, where very little that is good—and less that is worth discussing—is happening, I have instead turned to the past. I have been going through the physical boxes stored in my closet—boxing backwards—and building blog posts around the items found therein.

As some of my Facebook friends have already seen, one category of “treasures” found in a box of very old items was certain pages torn out of some of my college notebooks (1965-1969), the margins of which are adorned with pencil, felt-tip, or ballpoint pen doodles made while obviously paying less than rapt attention to the words of my teachers. I will, for awhile, be using some of these doodles to illuminate selected blog posts. The doodles will most likely have nothing at all to do with the content of the post of above which they appear (as the one on this post does not); they will be art for art’s sake.

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