This poem was born out of a disappointment with misguided leftist psychoanalytic critiques of the 12 steps popularized in the 1990s. It thinks with an acknowledgement at the core of Boiled Owls, that in active addiction the subject becomes a vessel for the commodity, that capitalism's systemic drive for infinite consumption and growth is internalized by humans enduring addiction as affliction. The register of this poem had to be ecological, thinking with the earth in a time of mass catastrophe and extinction as a result of these unregulated and extractive processes innate to primitive accumulation. The language thus embraces abjection, futility, and the quiet rage of apathy to find its rhythm and hold space for the immensity of this heavy pain of climate death. It is but an attempt to let out the cry of grief that accompanies our historical present.
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"Interview With Todd Davis"
"Being in the woods or on a stream—which is a daily act for me because my home sits just to the east of 41,000 acres of forest—is akin to being in a church or synagogue or mosque for holy believers. I’m not the first to use such language, but I think of the places I go as forest churches, roofless churches, sacred and in need of no explanation. Their 'being' simply matters and feels miraculous. My walking and paying attention, noticing small changes, observing other-than-human lives is a form of prayer and a kind of poetry for me."
via GREEN LINDEN PRESS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Ian U Lockaby on Edward Salem's "Fullness"
"In Edward Salem’s poem “Fullness,” thought is derailed, not from the first instant but nearly, and in each subsequent instant the poem expands and contracts simultaneously in a dissent against time and space, as it leads us to a divine, non-existent anal inner mountain, where there is nothing (and everything) to be seen (at once). Operating intertextually with a Godhead in its poetics of negation, the poem manages, paradoxically, to build possibility through its persistent negations. Each time a line of argument becomes discernable, it’s quickly and forcefully wrought back around its own tail, creating coils of energy in refusal." |
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