Dog Days

…when pressed, people who use language creatively are likely to avoid an explanation, perhaps believing, and not incorrectly, that their creative configurations, in my case poems, are themselves the best explanation—no further explanation required. And I think there is merit in this excuse because often attempts at explanation are constructed with a determined ending in mind; that poems are just obscure little containers of truth, infertile without revelatory force. But how often is experience simply truthful, especially when we try to explain it? What did you do today? How many people could claim to be able to answer this, seemingly most simple of questions, with absolute certainty? We try to answer questions because they are unanswerable, just as I’m trying to explain my poetry now, even though my attempt will not do a good enough job.

I’m going to tell a story that might assist in my poems becoming more interesting to you. Last year I spent some time in London, I was part of what was playing out to be a very lopsided relationship. For whatever reason this resulted in my being in my then partner’s house during the day, while she and her mother were at work—I was living in the family home of my partner, which is not all that remarkable. The mother of this girl was something of an Anglophile, and whether I imagined it or not, did not approve entirely of my presence, my severely reduced wardrobe, or my interest in something as unproductively silly as poetry. ‘Unproductively’ and ‘silly’ are my words for this speculated disapproval, and I use them because I’m not in absolute disagreement with the idea that poetry is unproductive and silly; in fact a great benefit of poetry is in it’s resistance to irresponsible production and seriousness. Anyway, I still thank her, genuinely for the conditional hospitality. During the day I wrote poems on the household computer, some of which I’ve developed and are now on the website, for anyone to access if they have a computer, without having to accommodate my habits—I need not be inside your house, at your computer, eating your food, for you to read them. I indulge this fantasy, whereby the mother figure of this story discovers my poems on her computer, and subsequently berates me before kicking me out of her house. In the fantasy I am an accomplice to my own banishment; I agree that my poems are reason enough for her disapproval, I disapprove of them myself. As I read my poems I hope that you can bear this story in mind, and perhaps regard them with a shared sense of fantastic disapproval, and maybe even imagine yourselves kicking me out of your own house in conclusion.