Forward to a Longer Bit About Mushing & Poetry (It Gets a Bit Less Nerdy, I Think)

Forward

I had wanted to write a scholastic work about the process of the lyric—how its exacting interiority reveals a sort of fulcrum wherein examination opens out into exteriority & uncertainty. How a poem, when it works at its highest level, admits that, or more specifically, pursues it with abandon. The entire thesis, once I lifted it sturdy & steadfast from the tempest of a decade, a “girder still itself among the rubble,” simply that a poem unwilling to know its conclusion was a poem in honest interaction with the world. Was the only kind of poem ethically capable of meaning because it was the only kind with a circumscribed limit past which it was confident in careening. One that could exhaust the limits of selfhood to find the world in all of its dizzying, spectacular uncertainty beckoning instead. A poem this way becomes an adventure, a form acting as a conduit, a trail leading off into the darkest night, the pinprick stars casting but dull & adumbrated light over the whole enterprise. The gaze of its author the beaming headlight, the syllabary of its construction the forging cadence of a dog team faring forward, the obfuscations of meaning the driving snow blinding & wind-whipped, & the meaning maybe over the next peak, maybe somewhere between the banks of a mile-wide river, maybe caught up in stolen & fugitive glances of sleep, or else strewn out along the whole winding, vermicular affair, between the pawprints of fourteen dogs & the spindrift parallel lines written in the snow by the passing sled.