Page 158 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II
P. 158
NOTES
Dark Matter’s mission asks the question, “How shall we live in these times?” We live in
confusion about our own natures as something quite animal and yet separate from the
“wild” that we shield ourselves from both physically and philosophically. In his book
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, David Abram notes that, “We are by now so
accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to
our directly felt experience of things--of insects and wooden floors, of broken-down cars
and bird-pecked apples and the scent rising from the soil--seems odd and somewhat
misguided as a way to find out what’s worth knowing....This directly experienced terrain,
rippling with cricket rhythms and scoured by the tides, is the very realm now most
ravaged by the spreading consequences of our disregard” (4-6). My poems explore how
humans crave the natural world just as we’re so eager to escape it, how we mold
animals and plants to serve our needs without considering the consequences to them or
us, how our desire to anthropomorphize everything blinds us to a beauty that exists
beyond ourselves. There’s a loneliness in our “cult of expertise” that I hope to embody in
my poems as a way of questioning our place in the world and to make note of the power
of the planet we’ve found ourselves on.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jaime R. Wood is the author of Living Voices: Multicultural
Poetry in the Middle School Classroom (NCTE 2006). Her
poems have appeared in Dislocate, Matter, Juked,
ZYZZYVA, DIAGRAM, Phantom Drift, among others. She
currently lives in Portland, Oregon, with her cat Alistair, who
has trained her to turn on the water faucet every morning so
he can drink out of the sink.
