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{subject matter} amorak huey I have two answers for when people ask what my poems are about: “suicide” and “the inadequacy of language to capture the breadth of human experience, and also suicide.” If someone fails to change the subject, I’ll add that I plan to start writing more about sex. This is a lie, of course – my poems already about sex, because: what else? What good is yet another poem about the snow in the snowy woods behind the house where my father grew up – unless someone is having sex, possibly in a canvas tent, possibly my father and mother escaping their parents – my grandfather didn’t like my dad from the first date when he showed up in purple bathrobe and wild beard. So in summer they would lie on the moon-scarred dunes along the Lake Michigan shoreline and in winter they would zip their sleeping bags together in an Army surplus shelter and seek amnesia in each other’s flesh. What did they talk about? It is hard for me to see them as kids – as flawed, as fallible – I cannot pretend objectivity, I am making up these stories in hopes of discovering something about myself, as if imagining the moment of my creation would explain things – perhaps would answer a question I am not wise enough to ask. This is the opposite of suicide. |
