Ken Poyner’s Comments
As to these poems, it seems I send a lot of material to FRiGG that deals with personal relationships. My wife and I have been married for more than 30 years, and we have no children. My wife was an only child of a couple that were married for more than sixty years, and I am one of two children from a couple who were married not quite fifty years. Stability is the two thousand pound rhinoceros in the room. I do not know the experiences of other people, but I have seen—and been a part of—the sort of relationship where each member of a couple can complete the other’s thoughts, will herald the other’s gestures. It is like a parallel star system—one star wobbles only because of the presence of the other star. The wobble begins to define the star, but that wobble is only the gravity of a separate star, that surely has its own sympathetic wobble. Each star is the star that it is due only to the fact of being dual stars.
Of course, it makes no sense. If it made sense, if it added up, there would be no poetry in it. I once heard the advice “write about what you know.” That is silly. You have to write about what you suspect. No one can produce good work unless they are first producing it to amaze themselves. And in our lives nothing is as full or fouled with art and pygmy mathematics as our companionships, our ritualistic coupling, that mechanical part of biology that somehow in our culture transcends its initial reasonableness, and utility to become something brutally, crystalline different, something which almost seems as though it could not have come from the original Machiavellian design.
And, if I knew what I was trying to describe, I could spend less time with the notebook, and more with a workout partner. But good poetry is supposed to create the questions you solve with the underside of your DNA. So I hope something here is perplexing.
|
