Poetry Northwest & The Gift

Delayed as ever, but I have three oceanic poems at Poetry Northwest.

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Unrelated: I’ve been reading very slowly and in circular motions The Gift, thinking about the deep desire to be free of ego-driven, exchange-structured interactions…how the ritual of freely giving/receiving can bind a community together, how this require a transcendent space that is mysterious, into which and from which all “gifts” move. There’s something compelling to me in the necessity of a “sense of imbalance, of shifting weight.”

The book is ultimately about artistic practice, but I’ve also been thinking about community: how to navigate relationships poetically; how I have tended to keep smaller circles because I’m wary of transactionally driven interactions, seeking instead relationships built on vulnerability and non-conditional generosity. I suppose I’m overly protective, which is limiting, but I’m also in search of something specific. Anyway, some passages:

“A market exchange has an equilibrium or stasis: you pay to balance the scale. But when you give a gift there is momentum, and the weight shifts from body to body.”

“For we are only alive to the degree that we can let ourselves be moved.”

“If, when we work, we can look once a day upon the face of mystery, then our labor satisfies. We are lightened when our gifts rise from pools we cannot fathom. Then we know they are not a solitary egotism and they are inexhaustible.”