Why We Are Becoming Unbound
For such a metaphorical work, it has a very literal beginning.
In the course of my usual writing routine, on the morning of December 23, 2021, I spilled some coffee unto my notebook page. Then I scrawled, on the lines around the stain, “evidence all over the page/a tipped cup of coffee on December 23.”
A good line.
But evidence of what?
The answer came to me slowly: evidence of a general spilling, of everything. Every aspect of my life. My work. My writing. Even my personality…
In that moment, everything was sloshing around like water in a bucket, some spilling onto the ground.
Is there such a thing as unspilling?
I already had some pieces that evoked a kind of personal disintegration, a crack-up. A poem about fluidity that recalled T.S. Eliot’s Tiresias figure from The Wasteland. A sonnet in alexandrines about Baudelaire. A poem about Barberini’s faun (featured on the cover of my first chapbook I Sit At This Desk and Dream: Notes from a Sunday Morning on Instagram) and the mythological figure of Marsyas. A piece about Priapus. A few animal bits.
But I wrote a lot of it in a burst—carnival imagery, ghosts, fever dreams.
Around that time, during a conversation about weighty matters, a wise and lovely friend said to me, “We are always becoming unbound.”
Soon after, an artist friend, Pier Gustafson, sent me a digital drawing of a weather-beaten classical bust, inspired by a photograph I had sent him.
And there it was…title, cover, poem. We Are Becoming Unbound: A Poem.
It’s a circus of a poem. Sometimes quite literally. But it’s also a poem for people who are wondering “What the hell just happened?” and “What the hell happens next?” and “Can we make some beauty from this mess?”
In the course of my usual writing routine, on the morning of December 23, 2021, I spilled some coffee unto my notebook page. Then I scrawled, on the lines around the stain, “evidence all over the page/a tipped cup of coffee on December 23.”
A good line.
But evidence of what?
The answer came to me slowly: evidence of a general spilling, of everything. Every aspect of my life. My work. My writing. Even my personality…
In that moment, everything was sloshing around like water in a bucket, some spilling onto the ground.
Is there such a thing as unspilling?
I already had some pieces that evoked a kind of personal disintegration, a crack-up. A poem about fluidity that recalled T.S. Eliot’s Tiresias figure from The Wasteland. A sonnet in alexandrines about Baudelaire. A poem about Barberini’s faun (featured on the cover of my first chapbook I Sit At This Desk and Dream: Notes from a Sunday Morning on Instagram) and the mythological figure of Marsyas. A piece about Priapus. A few animal bits.
But I wrote a lot of it in a burst—carnival imagery, ghosts, fever dreams.
Around that time, during a conversation about weighty matters, a wise and lovely friend said to me, “We are always becoming unbound.”
Soon after, an artist friend, Pier Gustafson, sent me a digital drawing of a weather-beaten classical bust, inspired by a photograph I had sent him.
And there it was…title, cover, poem. We Are Becoming Unbound: A Poem.
It’s a circus of a poem. Sometimes quite literally. But it’s also a poem for people who are wondering “What the hell just happened?” and “What the hell happens next?” and “Can we make some beauty from this mess?”
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