Poetry Projects

ALMANAC for the end of time

Writer’s Statement

This manuscript began as a series of poems inspired by The Old Farmer’s Almanac. I have always been drawn to the night sky, and I found myself intrigued by the different names of the full moons, the origins of those names and how they have persisted through time even as we are continually becoming disconnected from the world(s) these moons represent. I became deeply curious about the moon’s centrality to the monthly calendar, its witness to history, and its binary feminine relationship with the sun. Yet, as I have continued to develop poems around the images and ideas born from The Old Farmer’s Almanac, I see the potential for them to capture more than just the life of the moon.

As the working title for this manuscript suggests, time itself is a major theme. I aim to explore the ways we conceive of time in the abstract terms of scientific and metaphysical theories as well as our concrete forms of measurement—maps, calendars, and records—the remnants of all that came before now and define the characteristics of this living age. Thus, tense will be significant, and I imagine refining these poems to make sure they speak to the future, in the way an almanac does, while simultaneously challenging our current concepts of “the future.” The violent and the erotic will serve thematically as well, as in states of violence and eroticism we experience pure presence. Naturally, as with all poetry, language, too, will be a central concern. Language, history, and power share an intimate relationship here, as record and lingua franca are historically the result of conquest—think of Julius and Augustus both imposing their names onto the calendar. I am interested in naming as imposition, and I am interested in the power and process of poetry to unname and rename. As a poet I tend to concentrate on the line and overlook the sentence, so I am building this manuscript first, brick by brick, as prose poems. This has led to examinations of syntax and how it reflects power in terms of the ways it can prioritize or subjugate, and this seems incredibly important to me as I flesh out themes of masculinity and femininity in an attempt to amplify the female voice in a time when many of our cognitive constructs are predominantly masculine in origin and nature. In this way, I hope the poems will jettison ways of thinking that no longer serve us well, if they ever did.

I am excited about this project because I feel its depth and density every time I step in to its space. It’s ambitious, but my vision of its structure and the process by which I will create it are clear. This collection will be 52 poems divided into four sections that move from season to season through a 13-month cycle (July to July), which fits inside a year but also violates the 12-month calendar; each poem will not be strictly pinned to a single week but rather will be made from layering historical and contemporary events on top of one another to show their connectedness across time and space. A snapshot of my current writing space illustrates my other inspirations for this project: Paul Bogard’s The End of Night: Searching for Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light, Mary Ruefle’s essay “Poetry and the Moon” from Madness, Rack, and Honey, Stephen Hawking’s The Illustrated A Brief History of Time, Martin Heidegger’s Poetry, Language, Thought, and Jacques Derrida’s Writing & Difference, Of Grammatology, and Speech and Phenomena. This space also includes notebooks with my drawings of moon phases and evolutionary spirals, timelines of American wars, illustrated lyrics to Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon,” space race dogs Belka and Strelka, and etymology charts that attempt to capture the origins of the various words we use to reference time. Given the density I would like to create in these poems, these images help me see more clearly what I am trying to say; they unlock connections between time, space, and thought that language cannot always do on its own. I share this snapshot with you to point to everything else I am thinking about, yet in this early stage I cannot fully articulate how it all fits together. I just have to write the book.