Sign

David Mutschlecner

An author’s statement

One of my favorite thought-rhymes in poetry is between Walt Whitman and Robert Duncan.

Whitman: There was never any more inception than there is now.

Duncan: There is no way that daily I have not been

initiate.

The admission is all.

It is in the posture of initiation that we realize inception is now. In the posture of first discoveries we find that the world is being created now. On our knees in wonder we know the eternally fresh work of the Holy Spirit. This is the posture of initiation, and its admission is indeed all, for through this posture the world in all its newness greets us. As initiates, we see that love and language come together at once; the origin of one is the origin of the other: “In the beginning was the Word.” A poetry of theophany is a poetry that embraces the thought-rhyme between Whitman and Duncan; this is the poetry I aspire toward in Sign.

Sign is divided into three sections: the biblically prophetic, the personal, and the experimental. The biblically prophetic voice is a springboard to speak into the present. These poems are, therefore, only reservedly persona poems. The ancient prophet is, again, charged with time: the metaphysical becomes existential. In the last poem of this first part, “The Angel,” the existential becomes the platonic; the speaker assumes a rather timeless, hierarchic voice. But here, as in all the poems of the first part, the effort is to shine a light, not to impose an alien form. The second grouping, a sequence called “Gatherings at the Cusp,” is more immediately my own personal voice. At times these poems seem (to me) to be knots of language that contend for the truth. But adversarial elements are harmonized by the spiritual, are inscaped through Mary in her manifestation as the Virgin of Guadalupe. The third grouping broaches, toward the end, upon concrete poetry. I am pleased that these most overt religious poems are also the most experimental. Here I want words to function physically (actually, I always want this) so that spacings present a real place, a real parting in space, for the healing Spirit. I want the poem to be a ground for sacred action. In this way “Poems for the Feast of Corpus Christi” are efforts of aspiration.

That poetry aspires is crucial to me, is absolutely central to the very idea of what poetry is. The transcendental aspects of the human person—goodness, truth, and beauty—would be unavailable without this atmosphere of aspiration whereby we live and breathe and move. Paradise is pivotal to this—the dream of Paradise, the final cause.