The Czar

About the Book

I have called this book The Czar because, like in Kafka’s references to the emperor, the czar is an emissary of God, or God on earth, but one hidden and beyond the reach of certainty. So this is a book about the uncertainty and unattainability of God. It is a requiem to the promise of a romantic love to last forever, always promised and always withheld. What may be my last book of love poems, at least such commemorative love poems as are written to loves in my wayward past, I have, as usual, committed many poems to the love of God. Though raised in the simplicity of Calvinism, I have developed a love and confess a longing for the ideas and aesthetics of the high churches, the Roman Catholic and its sister church the Byzantine or Orthodox Church of the East. I do not confuse the two but love them separately. I am a lover of Orthodox icons, which in their fidelity to platonic forms, clearly defined shapes, bordered with definite lines, and often in geometrically quantifiable shapes, such as circles, ellipses, and all manner of formulaic curves—in these, I sense eternity and stillness, unchanging from its beginnings. In my poems, I have applied this aesthetic in the form of clear-cut ideas, a tendency away from opacity of image or imagism as it’s sometimes called. There is also presence of the meandering asymmetry or gothic aesthetics of Roman Catholic churches of France and Germany. While I hold fast to ideas, I have employed a winding complexity of word and image in expression of such ideas, a kind of inverted wandering, which I think speaks to the Catholic in me. I am especially knotted in feelings for this book’s muse, Emily Gray—the only one to receive two books from this struggling poet, the girl I most wanted to marry but did not, one with whom I have lost contact. This, like all the other books, contains both a sinner’s longing for God and an erring lover’s longing for forgiveness—the theme of all five books I have written as Blake Townsend Romanov. It is a name I chose in part as a pun that bespeaks loneliness—Townsend, as in the outskirts of town; Romanov, as in roaming off into the wilderness, perhaps into the sunset like the cowboy heroes of the old Western black-and-white films.

About the Author

Rather than a factual biography, but instead to say only that Blake Townsend Romanov is pseudonym, though each name is taken from the family tree, I will give, if you will, an aesthetic biography. My three favorite poems of the English language are Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden and Digging For China by Richard Wilbur. I love all these because the sound is sweet and the imagery as arresting as it is seamless. Occasional moments of jarring diction and construction in a Beethoven like manner are often welcome in poetry. However I do hold that poetry is music and there is a quazi-musical quality to the way its images are summoned and organized, a sense of flow and interconnection even to trail of its most abstract ideas. My taste in poetry is not wholly classical: I love Robert Lowell, W.S. Merwyn and Ted Hughes and Allen Ginsburg, Frank O’Hara, and also Margaret Atwood. I myself wish to bring some of the dissonance and stark reality of contemporary poetry to blend with the classical aesthetic. I write in meter both for sound and the way in which commonplace phrases must be discarded and reworked to suit the syllabic structure, and so rhyme performs a similar function, and thus I find myself addressing the minute structure of the words and awaking from the somnambulance of every day speech.