My most recent full-length collection of poems ends in a glib but insistent mood, with the line— and now I have this perfect life.
A new edition is coming out in London early next year and I’ve added a section about that imperfect perfection I was trying to attain and mythologize by embracing sacrifice, crisis, dying archetypes, and the fact that genocides recur and in many ways keep the time we call ‘history’ endless and measurable in intervals of mass death or not at all. For a life to be perfect(ed) it has to know this and find an internal clock that chooses ridiculous optimism against whatever odds come up, until the bitter end of humanity’s tragedy fetish. Tragedy is never the highest form of art unless the society is sick.
