whispered lineage

“Axis Mundi (a love-song)” and “Involuntariness” respond to the theme of contemporary INVOLUTION, for Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Issue 82: https://vvpoetry.com/

On the poems:

“For a long time it seemed that the only way to poetically counter a surplus of production was to insist on a ‘poetics of austerity’. Poetic minimalism was a mode of resisting excess, in a linguistic register. But these two poems respond to the theme of ‘involution’ – already an expression of turning inward, of in-grown self-suppression – by enacting what could be called a ‘poetics of hyperbole’, where poetic speech resists a curtailing or repressing of verbal fullness, or freedom. If the human is to overcome the economic and lived dominion of the consumer device, the virtual, the artificially intelligent, then perhaps it can only do so by giving voice to a uniquely trans-virtual erotic poetics. In Axis Mundi (a love-song), this takes the form of a symbolic descent into the psychic underworld, where a saving encounter can take place, and possibly restore a sundered wholeness. In Involuntariness the sense in which collective life in the past two decades of convergent crises has overwhelmed the human, is evidenced by the deep loss of agency contemporary social ‘involution’ appears to disclose. But perhaps the contemporary excess of production, of all kinds, can be met by a better – because biologically wilder – form of growth; and by an equally human confession of half-life, or bare surrender. I’m not sure where the human will go, and a living poetics with it. But we can try to bear witness to it.”

“Aquamarine” and “Who Asked?” in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Issue 81: “Lying Flat”: https://vvpoetry.com/2025/01/12/issue-81/

On the poems:

“loosely inspired by the East Asian lyric traditions of the epigrammatic expression of often Buddhist-inspired reflection on the ‘great matters of life and death’: a raw grappling with impermanence, suffering, and emptiness (psychological and metaphysical), often in a gestural spontaneity marked by both humour and pathos. Aquamarine foregrounds a crepuscular renunciation towards death, figured nocturnally, against the illusory non-sense of human striving in life’s daylight. Who Asked? soliloquizes a radical relativity of experience over a perspective of the multiple lives of the self, whereby each becomes equally as significant, and ‘meaning-free’, as another.”