| Description |
Whelm is part wildness and part witness, part love song and part lament. It is an elegy to former times and selves that admits fear of a future where humanity, community and strangeness are lost to manmade systems, and is also an ode to oddity and intricacy. These poems attempt to understand how difficult it is to be a thinking, feeling, speaking being in a largely impenetrable world-both wordless and written over with various conflicting narratives. In this manuscript, people are engulfed by forces larger than they, such as natural disasters and love, and are equally overwhelmed by their own feelings, desires and ideas. A central concern of the manuscript is figuring out how to live an authentic life or have real intimacy in a world that rapaciously wants to name, categorize, and commodify us. I conceive of language as an intervention, as textured and complex in a way that frees us from abbreviation and generalization. This manuscript suggests-as Bataille and others have before me-that there is violence in the ideal, that cruelty often arises out of categorybecome- hierarchy, and that perhaps the only conceivable solution to our flooding is flooding . . . to resist being capsized by giving into the roiling mess of our hearts and minds by admitting the endless cataclysms of our love, our inimitable eccentricities, and the ineffaceable plurality of being. This manuscript is informed by these wayward enactments of grief and loss, and by what Czeslaw Milosz called "A Poetics of Hope," wherein poets remain hopeful despite an intense awareness of the dangers menacing what we love. The world is not comfortable, containable, settled, or transparent, nor is what our own perspectives and collective narratives do with that world. I return to the truths of particularity and plurality, to detritus, explosion, fracture, to trying to cut through doxa and cliché to attempt to articulate the complexity of existing in the world, let alone a world increasingly ravaged by the forces of the market, industrialization, and large-scale mechanized warfare, wherein we are often very remote witnesses. |
