About the title

The title is also that of one of the most recent poems in the collection.  "Collapse of the grid" is a phrase I'd heard used in electric system operations and media coverage of same, to refer to large-scale failures of the transmission grid that cause extended blackouts.  I liked the phrase originally both because of its inherent poetic drama and because it tied in well to visual work I was looking at, especially by artists like Eva Hesse who both used grid systems in their drawings but also allowed such systems to "break down," if you will.  Under the influence of drawings like Hesse's I did some large scale pen and ink drawings on pink vellum which I gave that title.  One of them was the only drawing I've been able to get into a juried art show to date, at the Berkeley Art Center about four years ago I think.

Last year I wrote a poem with the same title, to be found in the last section of the collection.  I chose it to be the book's "title poem," as they say, because of this nexus between my writing and day job, and in the "back story" my drawing and visual work, which it seems to point toward even as it also, obviously and ironically, points toward the mortality (possible, probable, and eventually certain failure) of all efforts...