Swooshing Pasts

Book excerpt: This is the second book of Swoosh Family poems. So I guess you might like to know where the Swoosh family came from. The actual Swooshes are scribbles that live at the bottom of some pages in my written idea-journals. They started out as nameless, undistinguished scribbles to end a page and fill up an extra line or so at the bottom. Somewhere about three years in they began to take a particular shape that reminded me of faces so I began adding eyes and mouth indications. That gave them a personality in my jaded eyes. They were looking at me as I turned the page and they sort of reminded me of people I knew or knew about. I wrote a poem, then three, then three hundred or so. The family members and extended family members are not my own family necessarily, but are each based on people I have met, in some cases heard about; it's a writer thing I guess. Check these out; you may know some of them yourself.