the true keeps calm biding its story

Rusty Morrison

Selected for the 2007 Sawtooth Poetry Prize by Peter Gizzi

Winner of the 2008 James Laughlin Award

 

An author’s statement

 

This cycle of poems began with the words that end each line: “stop,” “please,” and “please advise.” Their urgency—their complex of entreaty, desire, anxiety, and even a bit of humor—generated a perceptual position, and a form, that allowed a kind of articulation and compression that I hadn’t previously been able to sustain. Sometime soon after I began these poems, my father contracted pneumonia, and then he died within a few days of being admitted to the hospital. He had other physical problems, illnesses, but there’d been no reason to expect he would die so suddenly.

In this poem cycle I was able to work through some of the shock of such an enormous absence made so viscerally present. And, as the manuscript evolved, I found this work to be a means of questioning my perception of the interrelationships among many of the other presences and absences that make up what I understand as reality.

In some respects, the form of these poems may remind the reader of a telegram. In many ways, the poems did emerge as a communication to an elsewhere, or I might say, a communication to the now-right-here—the moment’s immediacy—which I too often fail to realize.

So much in life seems to come randomly—so many of the tiny and sudden pleasures, the insights, the shocks and losses, the life-changing events. Yet, random as they are, I’m haunted by a sense that there’s value in observing the line of interface between these differences. I’m interested in borders, those made by the random meeting of discordant experiences. I’m intrigued by the shape, the pattern, and the trajectory of those almost imperceptible dividing lines.

I’ve used the writing of these poems to pursue not only what might be discernible as eddies rippling the constant streaming of life experience, but also as a means to pursue the nature of the evolving ‘self’, that mask upon the face of the inscrutable ‘otherness’ to which the messages of these lines might also be addressed.