I want to run till my feet start bleeding, I want to make it all the way to the ocean

[sovay]

Some thematic things.

1. My poems "Dis Genite et Geniture Deos" and "Cosmopolitan Bias," published last October in The Cascadia Subduction Zone 7.3, are now free to read online with the rest of their issue. Notes are here. Stephen Miller has popped back up in the news again, so I feel that cursing him is still timely.

2. The rediscovered life of groundbreaking queer Jewish activist Leo Skir: "Two weeks ago, I had said to him, 'You can cure yourself. In a day, a minute, a second, with three words, with six. I'm-not-sick—three words. Three words more: I-love-myself.'"

3. An archaeological, mythological poem I did not write: Judith Willson, "A Bone Flute."

Comments

[sovay]

If you don't mind me asking: what do you think of the commentary after the poem?

Everyone reads poetry differently. I like the way Rumen unpacks the visual and aural density of the poem and identifies the point at which it shades from a strictly realistic scene—a flight of swans over a parking lot—to something more ambiguous and mystical; I agree with her where she sees a blurring of swan and human, living and dead, but I feel she overreaches when she suggests these figures are keeping a deathwatch, or that they are something more predatory than swans. Insofar as I made this distinction while reading the poem, I thought of the "mothers or sisters" in continuity with the "messengers returning at nightfall," the swans themselves. I am much more inclined to accept them as psychopomps than the risen dead. Their wings are doors. They hold out their hands. Our faces fade. I thought of a couplet from Robert Holdstock's Lavondyss (1988), which I have no reason to believe the poet knows: A fire is burning in Bird Spirit Land. My bones smoulder. I must journey there. North is magnetic, home. I wonder if the "skeins streaming north" are souls. But I am not sure this is a poem intended to be decoded down to the bone. I know what echoes and associations it sets up in my mind, but if I read that Willson had written it thinking of something quite different, that would be all right.

it showed me what someone else got out of the poem, but left me uncertain how much of that is what I should have gotten out of it, vs. being one person's individual interpretation that might not be shared.

I lean toward the latter. What did you get out of it, independent of the commentary?