Dear Reader,
Occasionally, I find myself wandering the city with no discernable purpose or destination. Almost without fail, after putting a mile or two city blocks behind me, I find myself seated just outside Madison Square Park, looking at the iconic Flatiron Building. About midday, when the sun reaches its peak, the building seems to cleave the sun in two and depending on where you’re sitting, you’re either coated in shadows or exposed to the brilliant light of the noonday sun.
The duality of light and shadow evokes in us metaphysical parallels—body and soul, vice and virtue, passion and reason—shadows those darker, earthly realities, and light, the numinal and transcendent. Humans have the distinct pleasure of sitting on the borders between the two, our being at once material and immaterial, body and soul, woven together so that one is hardly discernible from the other. Yet being creatures of extremes, we don’t do well with tension, and so our lives tend to bend toward one or the other. We embrace the carnal, the fleshy, and the physical, or we spend our days in vain trying to transcend our mortal flesh. The poet isn't afforded such luxuries. They must sit on the fence, at once spending their lives in the physical world while also trying to make room for the immaterial world of language and ideas.
As I sat somewhere on the border between shadow and sunlight, I began to put into words the tension we all seem to experience—the need to be rooted in the physical world and our ever-present desire to transcend it, our primal nature in conflict with our virtuous souls. Of course, one tends to win out over the other. While this Platonic dualism seems all-consuming, the human search for wholeness reminds us that we were never meant to live in conflict with ourselves and that our ultimate hope lies in the bridging of the material and the ephemeral—the union of body and soul.
Enjoy!
NOON AT THE FLATIRON
With shadows on either side
The sun here appears rare,
A sliver of yellow light
Cutting the city in two.
Each appealing to our baser instincts,
Our better natures hewn in half—
Maslow’s theory of needs
A tragic but salient truth.WRITING UPDATE:
I have officially begun shopping my novel around. It was a daunting task to edit and refine the manuscript, but after reviewing it with some help, I’m confident it’s in good enough shape to send around to various small presses, agents, and publishing houses. It was a joy to write, and I hope I’ll soon get to share it with you in its entirety. I have also begun shopping around a new poetry collection, a volume I am really proud of. I hope to find a new home for this collection and with a publisher who can help me network this collection, as I am terrible at “selling” my own work. Lastly, I’ve begun writing some short stories, and in a burst of creativity have about 40 pages of work to show for it. I hope to turn these stories into a collection, but first, I hope to share some of them here with you and in other journals and publications.
As always, thank you for reading my work, and if you’ve been enjoying these emails, please feel free to send them along to a friend!
-Ryan