Abstract

Formally, this poem is constructed to discover what sorts of apparent meanings and resonances may be engendered by assembling fragmented and disjunctive units as parts of a whole, and also, if possible, to discover what's lost in the same process. The poem is assembled in one hundred and eight discrete units, some titled, others left untitled. Some names, ideas, and voices carry over from one unit to another, providing, however tenuous, connective tissue. In large part, however, this is not the case, and where it is not, the reader is left to his or her own devices to derive sense from one unit to the next. There is no coherent internal structure; rather, the poem depends on discord and fracture between sections for effect. Reflected in the title is the idea that a work which was previously whole, and perhaps the better for it, has somehow been shattered, and we are left to do what we can with the remnants. In terms of its content, it is a poem concerned with the quotidian, human dilemmas of day to day living: of love, friendship, and the struggle to find one's way in a world mediated in part through newspaper articles. Among the conflict of competing voices and visions, in a poem characterized to a great extent by the anxiety of its expression, several intimate and (I think) humorous perspectives emerge as well.