I’m reading Tony Tost‘s first published book of poetry (and winner of the Walt Whitman Award) invisible bride.

From Story South here is a brief selection from that work.

It’s like waking up and kissing a mirror good morning. The challenge is finding a reason. One approach is holding onto the ball, staying in bounds, waiting for the clock to run out. There are lots of reasons strutting around, flapping their wings, but they are often stupid reasons. Entire towns sell their souls for any number of reasons; people die for one, maybe two reasons. I had a pet chicken. Echo. He was my favorite chicken. Had him when I was a child (first chicken best chicken). Tonight the night is a black moth. A spoon grazing my lips. Tonight the night is a black mouth. They killed my favorite chicken. Tonight the night is a black month or a red month. It’s December. A man passes a door three or four times before he realizes it’s the way out.

There’s more over at the site.

The whole book forms a kind of narrative and frankly that’s what interests me about it. The opening sequence, as much as I recognize the masterful handling of image and feeling, also irritates me because of its conceptual foundations. (I’m a bit touchy about idea, I think).

It starts like this:

The Man's Vision begins with the child's Sob.

Who shall say what one's Vision has to offer another? Yet, in many
cases, Vision's pat h is presented with such singular exactness of fidelity
that we are perfectly safe in submitting the minds of even the youngest
children to its influence: the gatehouse will hold firm and keep out the
invaders, and the fires shall illuminate the archers manning the
battlements.

Fire is indeed a sweet and proper vision for children; it is most instruc-
tive and fascinating, and forms a realistic preparation for the afterlife,
with a more serene and thoughtful appreciation of its meaning. We
might fan our flames by a thousand and one simple observations; for
instance, that the same sun which ripens by beans illumines an inner
ward with is a nightmare of smoke and flames and the screams of
horses and men.

And now post “afterlife” I have to work at it. It has stopped being emotionally intelligible to me.

As it happens I was reading about “new materialism” today. Partly that’s because I am seeking an ordering principle for a developing poetry manuscript. Tost’s work reminds me of William Blake, or some cross between an Alchemical Mystic and Shaman. There is undeniable power there yet I would rather be allowed to find my “path” on the actual earth, the one we really inhabit.

Where are the narratives based on the relationships between levels of chemical and biological functioning systems? Where are those stories? Those hero ones, the Visions, and Archetypes, they are all based on the relationship between the real and the unreal and so cannot guide us out of the miasma we have made of our species and environment. For that we need an actual road, one we can actually walk.

Bah.