If you think the cover design of A. Robert Lee’s TIME TRAVELS recalls the design of City Lights Books’ Pocket Poets Series, you are not wrong. According to its editor, the Cast Iron Poetry Series is intended to emulate that classic line of poetry chapbooks. Lee’s is the 18th title released to date.
Here’s an excerpt:
Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (1859)
There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
—George Santayana, Soliloquies In England and Later Soliloquies (1922)
i More than memory, mere chronometer one's personal time carousel. The blades circle-slide over, into, each other, enactive, kinetic. How easy to think life just time-chapters, the one and next page. But it's not that way, rather elision, overlap, ripple. A reprimand to stop and start. Time for all of us has been awkwardly fluent. Childhood, youth, when time was still thought time yet to come. Middle years, adulthood, when it was thought you had, or had lost, grip. Late age, veteran years, thinning skin, when there was recognition that often-attributed wisdom was a fault-line. A glut of other times there have been: things done full-time, part-time, many a time going over-time. Time itself must age you sometimes fancy, but if it does, it equally does not. Always the indifferent stakeholder. Always the successful investment broker. While oneself, body, mind, mirror, watch Time, or time, give it passing glance. There's little option but to take your final lead, with accusation, lament, rant. But Time, time, it needs not be doubted, heads on, without a seeming backward look or for that matter some forward salute. Just not giving way. Nor giving so much as a hoot. Even if we do. ii Odd that when you think Time an outsider you do so as your own timekeeper. I mean, count up the different stations. Date of birth, birthdays. School time, college. Marriage, parenthood, lost aunt. Trips, divorce. Accident, operation. Add in the dateless calendar. First kiss, last hurrah. Second in line, runner-up. Time when you were busy all the time. Time when it was a waste of your time. Time when it took longer than planned. Time when you got matters done in no time. Time when you did not take time to consider. Time when you didn't give it sufficient time. Speech carries each and every message. We're in no rush you tell the estate agent. Pronto you beseech the plumber. Never enough time you say to the family. They are away most of the time. This isn't the right time. The time is just right. Day in, day out, this month, that month, there's the feeling, more likely the conviction, that time is always a timeshare.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A. Robert Lee is the author of a dozen creative collections, including Japan Textures: Sight and Word (2007) with Mark Gresham), Tokyo Commute (2011), Ars Geographica: Maps and Compasses (2012), Imaginarium: Sightings, Galleries, Sightlines (2013), Password: A Book of Locks and Keys (2016), Off Course: Roundabouts & Deviations (2016), Written Eye: Visuals/Verse (2017, Writer Directory: A Book of Encounters (2019), Daylong; Nightlong: 24 Hour Poetry (2020), Suspicious Circumstances (2020), and Outside In: Hinges and Swivels (2022).
He was Professor in the English Department at Nihon University, Tokyo 1997-2011, having previously taught for almost three decades at the University of Kent, UK. Currently he lives in Murcia, Spain. Under sun. Among his academic publications Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/and Asian American Fictions (2003) won the American Book Award in 2004. Other critique includes ed. Other Britain, Other British: Contemporary Multicultural Fiction (1995), Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998) — 25th Anniversary Edition (2020), Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction (2009), Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics (2010), The Beats: Authorships, Legacies (2019), and Native North American Authorship: Text Breath, Modernity (2022).
