Lee Sharks

Pearl and Other Poems (Crimson Hexagon) Lee Sharks

Pearl and Other Poems is part of a much longer poetic project, the Crimson Hexagon, a sweeping cultural epic for the 21st century. In a variation on the tradition of Browning or Pound?s Personae and approaching Ferdinand Pessoa?s art of the pseudonym, the Crimson Hexagon develops distinct writerly identities into a series of ?selections? from fantastic, non-existent works. Lee Sharks is the pseudonymous author of Pearl. Although the present volume is a series of poems, the sum effect of its genre in this broader context is applied literary history, in the same way that Tolkien considered his fictional accounts of Middle Earth as applied historiography. To adapt a phrase from Pound, we might describe the Crimson Hexagon as ?a history including poems.? In the context of this project, Sharks? is the voice that bursts forth with the greatest ferocity, fully formed, as it were, from Zeus?s forehead. The titular ?Pearl,? especially, I consider a triumph. ?Pearl? is an important poem, and Lee Sharks is destined to stick around for awhile. -Johannes Sigil, July 2014