WRITING FROM THE EDGE
One outreaches language in poetry when the inseeing elements of consciousness ask the unseen of life to come forward. My aim has been to unseat what we assume about time, about the verities of love and death, of the consciousness of those other sentient beings next to us on the planet. We must put aside the glib assumptions we make just to domesticate our walking-around days.
The kind of poetry that seeks a language beyond the very one in which it arrives may travel from edge to edge. It is provisional and can’t be too fussy about its sometimes awkward transport. In this pursuit, I find myself trying to out-leap what I can almost t say—but that, if said outright, would utterly spoil the secret cargo that must somehow halo what is attempting to be given. I have even said that at this stage I seem to be writing in some sense beyond language.
I want my worlds to interpenetrate—for sky to merge with water, for fish and birds to exchange habitations so we re-experience them freshly and feel our differences, our interdependence, our kinships.
Drucilla Wall, in her essay on my work in , hits on a central notion of my poetry when she quotes Vincent van Gogh from an epigraph in my 2011 volume, . Van Gogh writes: “The earth has been thought to be flat… science has proved that the earth is round… they persist nowadays in believing that life is flat and runs from birth to death. However,
