The Wilds as Discipline
The Wilds as Discipline: What it Means to Live a Poetic Life
A Collaboration for National Poetry Writing Month between Samantha Wallen and Michelle Puckett
What does it mean to live a poetic life? As poets attempting to write poetry and live poetic lives, we wonder. Upon hearing Bayo Akomolafe’s recent talk in Santa Rosa, CA on his book, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences, we wondered whether it might be possible to use #NaPoWriMo to practice, together, “the wilds” as discipline.
We hope to break up some of the psychic fascia which has tethered our writing practices to colonized-mind and capitalist fetishization of production and “hard” work. We want to go deeper into the unkempt spaces of living and writing poetic and explore — What might it look like to live into this metaphor alongside a nation of poets writing together all month?
Let us see…
easter morning
wild iris,
ritually gathered salt,
sage smoke & water.
beside green tea and fresh cut grass,
calla lilies for the cross.
jazz on the way to church
inside, i pray to the wilds. to our collective interstitium: make a net of us.
& noticing the work of the ones who prepare the way, we speak of living on walden pond vs. living under late capitalism
attempting to engage the theology
in real time, where what we are doing does not yet make sense, we fall off the edge of the world out where meaning gets loose & bleeds. but to understand in language sets forth a fractal of a possible shape into the physical world and (it’s true) in reverse, also.
i go soft there.
same as my thighs — the huge muscles & skin of them — becoming sensitive & heightened to pleasure just after i come. the feel of sheets against my skin. their texture, their weight, their temperature.
yes.
erotic expanse of the risen incarnation, whole-bodied
coming out of my winter fever,
a time of great heart-rending,
of profound opening.
an object lesson in interiority, they say
the cock continues to crow.
all day, birdsong.
i’ve done this 41 times: entering spring
such tender motions at flight
unfledged, as in not yet feathered.
beauty. whiteness. exposure.
what will be possible after we recognize what we want & just how deeply
make my book a trumpet of love,
coda of germination,
sun-streak of gob-smacked heart.
— michelle puckett
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