I made a few false starts and fidgets.
Do I talk about how reading and writing continue each other? About how a daily writing practice can have you working on two very different things at once, but they end up talking to each other? Do I talk about breaking ties with the Grandfather’s Barn poetics that are ever present if you live in a rural area? Do I talk about resisting the Contemporary Karaoke School of Poetics that will get you into some of the magazines but will leave you covered in an unpleasant residue? Do I talk about the MFA Recovery Process?
Do I talk about taking a hint from the backyard bird watchers and setting up a poem-feeder in the cherry tree? Making an inviting environment for poems out of a thrift store disco ball, some string, a rusty horseshoe, and any resonant metal one might find on neighborhood walks?
Of course not.
That kind of talk will only get you in trouble, so I ended up trying out a side by side comparison of my two recent Above / Ground chaps, Transmissions from the Crawdad Constellation and Boing, Extinction VS WOW! Signal. They’re sister chaps in a lot of ways and have ended up in the same book manuscript, entitled Half an Owl in Garden Light, which is looking for a home.
Crawdad is written in a set form, with both breath and the visual in mind. Alice Notley is an influence. So is Robert Lax. The static form is meant to highlight the unruly content.
Wow is written in a set form, playing with the prose sentence here and poetic enjambment there. Basho, Issa, Bernadette Mayer and Jorge Carrera Andrade are influences. The static form is meant to almost satirize how our chaotic and destructive lifestyle seems so stable and organized.
Crawdad is narrative, values slippery storytelling, and is interested in sci fi and horror tropes.
Wow is aggressively episodic and works by weaving facts about Foley art together with facts about animal smuggling, extinction, the actual Wow! Signal and people researching outer space in general.
Crawdad takes place in a big, wild, threatening, supernatural ecosystem.
Wow looks at activity in earth’s biosphere at a time of major decline as well as sound activity in space.
Crawdad is born from watching trashy horror and sci fi films and reading books about how certain ancient cultures formed religious and magical ideas related to the remains of now extinct megafauna, like mastodons.
Wow is born from reading everything I could find about Foley art, about the actual Wow! Signal, about animal smuggling, about the effect of extinction on the biophony, about the biophony itself, about extinction and ecosystems.
Crawdad is interested in taking part in fantasy, in entertaining, in escape, in taking part in our big dream.
Wow is interested in the powerful draw to create fantasy worlds, AND to search for distant life on other worlds, while simultaneously causing mass extinction here.
If Crawdad were not a poem, it would be a movie with great practical effects and set design, but lousy acting. It would have no star power and it would “do things the drive-in way,” as Joe Bob Briggs says.
If Wow were not a poem, it would be a long, boring documentary with a preachy tone and a minimalist synth score. I think we’re better off with it as a poem.
Both Crawdad and Wow touch on the Voice of God Weapon. I guess that’s all I’ll say about that.
Cheers!
