False Positives, an E-book of Lockdown-Era prose poems

 

FALSE POSITIVES

False Positives is not a collection of poems or prose poems, but 65 of what I like to call “uneasy hybrids,” each one started and refined and abandoned in one day, the whole collection written in 65 days while I was under strict C-19 lockdown in Turkey, unable to leave my apartment. I'd like to thank my good friend Eray Eren for providing me with one of his photographs to use for the cover.

Here is a link: https://www.amazon.co.uk/False-

Positives-John-Michael-Flynn-ebook/dp/B08GS7WKP1

As an attempt to respond to the psychic demands of the lockdown, to achieve a rough and immediate sense of honesty, closure and truth during a time period when I learned of my father’s death, each of the hybrids stays as close as possible to one page in length, written as a form of what I deem “anti-poetry,” without artifice, a rejection of the stale trappings of a diploma-driven corporatized erudition, its Woke fascism, its brutishly cliquish IM’d, Snapchatted, Facebooked, unnuanced, cowardly, workshopped and generally dishonest and mediocre stabs at truth that I believe have come to define and marginalize what the so-called experts now sell as poetry to an increasingly illiterate public. 

These hybrid pieces reject staid conventions, showy frills and pretense, seeking to communicate story, each a visceral examination from the inside out, a release into timelessness and soul. They are made of the broken, the disjointed, the unmuzzled and the joyous, of reminiscence, confusion and confession.

I hope my voice speaks in the moment to the moment, with an open nod to the influence of Breton’s surrealism, the pious Meditations of Donne, the prose poems of Baudelaire, and the energy of a mind unleashing itself and then pulling back to shape and sculpt hour by hour, from morning until day’s end, one work after another, each worthy, ultimately, of abandonment.