like a prayer was originally published as a digitally printed handbound book in 2007. The thirty poems gathered in the collection were all written between 2002 and 2007 when I was teaching at Shenzhen University and are part of a “poetics” I have been working on — as an artist and as a scholar — for five decades. I offer them here in the form of a downloadable pdf as a contribution to that continuing work. It seems to me that “city” is any place where the human presence settles and that settling (no matter how solid or permanent it may seem) is no more than a moment in a process. A collection of lyric poems, each a moment in itself, seems a fitting medium for reflection in the process of the body politic. | follow this link to view and/or download the pdf in a new tab.
lyrical abstraction in painting and poetry