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Ordinary Eros

I suppose my curse as a poet is that I just want to tell stories, which is tough given that a poem’s general relationship to time is one of suspension—to somehow pull back from the supposed linearity of events and stop time.

The poems published here each begin mid-action or mid-address. I’m interested in exploring the contour of a scene by stalling it. Instead of beginning in image or landscape, I tend to start where we see one person approaching or retreating from another. For me, most poems grow from a narrative point of longing or escape, and I guess I’m somewhat obsessed with how, through lyric suspension, human drama can leach (to use a sexy term) into landscape.

I want the poem’s images to reflect how conflict shapes our perception of the concrete world: the mind pushes against the landscape, and the landscape says dammit, and pushes back. As a result, the speakers in these poems have a pretty fraught relationship with their environments. They hate on their landscapes a bit (or are overwhelmed by them), but it’s really only a projection of frustrated desire—especially the desire to communicate, to connect.

“Adam at the Garden’s Edge” imagines the mythological moment where Adam and Eve cross the Rubicon. I don’t know why I went with Adam’s point of view, but there’s something about his passive, follower role in the biblical story that I find strangely compelling, even if he did initially rat out Eve. We’ve all blindly followed those we love—sometimes into heaven, and often into hell—and then tried to blame them. In the poem, Adam rebels against the notion of a lost paradise and struggles to communicate his embrace of their terrible, new world since only through banishment (and that damn apple/woman) does he understand love.

For years, I never wrote poems directly about my home—a small, beautiful, oppressive town in the mountains of East Tennessee. "Company Town" was one of the first I finished. I wrote it years after moving away, and I tried to write it from a bird’s eye view to explore what different kinds of longing might look like from a distance.

In the opening chapter of Moby Dick, Melville writes of the ocean:

There is magic in it. Let the most absentminded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries—stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region.

I feel this quote pretty much sums up the process of writing “Shark’s Tooth”: how a low stakes distraction is utterly trumped by the sea. The speaker’s mind, trying to latch onto the mundane task at hand (looking for sharks’ teeth) to impress a guy who is startlingly good at finding them, is overwhelmed. Where the speaker fails at the simplest task, the lover succeeds. Moreover, she can’t see very well, distracted by her attraction to this guy, by the sun, by a generalized sense of longing that everything around her increasingly reflects.

All this triggers a kind of disorientation. The landscape fragments into various sensory impressions; synesthesia occurs. By the end of the poem, I think the speaker focuses on the real power of Eros—how it allows one to disappear, how it annihilates the self. Eventually, that desire transfers from the dude she can’t keep up with to the larger landscape, where there’s a brief connection to a turbulence and longing beyond her experience.