Some Unrecorded Voyages of Vasco da Gama

My first poem in the "geographies" series appeared on my "gamma ways" blog at the beginning of 2009. I feel that the best description of my intent comes from Sam Lohmann who published some in an issue of the journal "Peaches & Bats" that he was editing at the time: "These pieces by Mark Young have a disturbing and comic speed, and seem, as a group, to get at some essential weirdness of the 'global' info-capitalist culture we're all trying to survive and live in." I began the visual "geographies" just under a couple of years later. At first they tended to be poems on a background, but gradually transformed into digital manipulations of images from places I looked up on the web. As time went on, I refined those locations to Australia & New Zealand, sometimes with a word or two added; but the intent was the same for the visuals as for the poems — the world is something different to what it's claimed to be. There have been five standalone collections of "geographies" over the years, mainly in chapbook or pdf format, plus a significant tranche in the wide-ranging 600-page collection, "The Codicils," that came out from Otoliths in 2013. A new collection, "Some Unrecorded Voyages of Vasco da Gama," that contains a number of visuals &, probably, the final "geographies" poems, is now released. — Mark Young