Poetry (to me) is a means by which we achieve illumination, via exploration of deep recesses—via interrogation/ excavation & derangement of self. One arrives at knowing by forgetting what one knows—you enter the room a dog, in searching, & the room becomes a chew toy full of peanut butter, a backpack full of buzzards, or the whole image is a cloud of pomegranates in a child’s hand. It transmutes us into ourselves’—obliterates & maintains us into better ways of loving, of facing all what faces us.
I like absurdity. I like being absurd in poetry because the world we live in is batshit-madness, most often, & in poetry the stakes are low – there’s no life to be lost, only made. Its “use” is in defiance of “usefulness” (as the capitalist-ugly world of property & product would have you see it). To play with that by which we understand—language—sound/ body/ imagery—is to make possible every potential self what rests (or unrests) inside us.
This rambling is due (in part) to my finding a dear friend’s poem in the Fall 2012 issue of The Greensboro Review: “A Cloud of Decisions Translates” by Matt Hart.
Matt Hart is a poet with a thousand heads, & a heart what can crush your skull (though he’d never allow his real heart do something so brutal to your actual skull). He’s a poet of obsession—he & his poems are after something, chasing after, whatever it may be the poems have caught scent of, until everything corresponding is amplified to the nth degree.
The poem is made of so much ordinary—the weather, scrambled eggs at a diner—& it’s anything but. It’s a poem concerned: with art, with art making, with making amends & making decisions. A Cloud of Decisions Translates—& here, the cloud is the poem or it’s the speaker. The decisions are the moves what get made in the making, & the making is what translates the untranslatable (which is poetry).
We enter the poem on the line: We own the horizon, so draw it out
Already, my brain is awash in multitudes: owning the horizon is impossible, unless it’s a sentiment as in: we only have this day, here & now, as we come or go. & then the drawing: which is a means of mark making/ an artform, a coaxing forth, or a way to hold onto an experience just a little longer . . .
& off we go: cascading down the poem through images exactly as complicated as the first line—never once stopping on an ending punctuation—only pausing in visual caesura, to catch our breath a moment. The way the poem is enjambed reminds me of what it means to be human—every line of the piece is itself a complex creature, one that is changed by, & changes, what came before & what comes after (all at once).
You can’t see the incredible shape the cloud makes until you’ve gone through it, arriving on the other side newly shaped yourself, & all there’s left to do is look up at the night sky/ and wonder.
“A Cloud of Decisions Translates” by Matt Hart can be found in Issue 92 of The Greensboro Review.
Samuel Cormac is an MFA Candidate in Poetry at UNC Greensboro where they serve as a poetry editor for The Greensboro Review.