How My Poetry Began
By Robert Savino Oventile
There is a field where there had been a movie set. There had been concrete slabs. There had been tall weeds. There had been fruit trees. There had been sunflowers. There had been a grease pit. There had been a massive pine. There had been racoons. There had been chicken coops. There had been the deep burial of love letters in a small casket. There had been a dirt-bike track. There had been running water, real and dreamt.
Poetry found me standing in that field.
A silence opened. The blue went neon, and the low clouds’ grey became tactile. The silence echoed.
Who stood? What? How did the stand entail poesis?
A given sunflower implies all the sunflowers and a biosphere allowing for sunflowers. A biosphere implies the Earth system: atmosphere, hydrosphere (lakes, oceans, rivers), cryosphere (glaciers and polar ice caps), and geosphere (Earth’s crust, rocks, soils) in their complex planetary-scale interactions with each other and with the biosphere over geologic time scales.
What stood? An example of Homo sapiens, implying the species.
To step toward the poesis, consider the Holocene, the geologic epoch that started about 12,000 years ago with the end of the last ice age, that is, with the end of the last glacial interval of the Pleistocene epoch. With the Holocene, the Pleistocene ended. Now, with anthropogenic global warming, the Holocene is ending, has ended.
The Holocene was a relatively stable climatic stasis. Burning fossil fuels delivered the Earth system from the Holocene. Stasis, ekstasis.
A daemon, possessing you, delivers you from stasis to ekstasis. There’s Achilles in Homer’s Iliad, brooding in the Achaean camp, when his daemonic muse Athena possesses him to reenter the battle at Troy and meet his ecstatic fate. The daemon catalyzes ekstasis.
Homo sapiens and fossil fuels entangle, and a new daemonization emerges, catalyzing an ekstasis departing from the Holocene’s relative stasis.
Who stood? A distinct sublunary entity open to possession.
My interpretive gambit, my speculative wager: in the field, the ekstasis was daemonic and of the Earth system’s deliverance from the Holocene, the deliverance of every sublunary entity, each vulture, gopher, oak, lake, glacier, person, Atlantic current, and so on, from the Holocene.
Rather than a flight skyward, this daemonization steps out from the Holocene and downward, an earthbound katabatic transport.
Climate science knows the Holocene’s end. The daemonic transport brings a poet, in that end, crossing its threshold, to imagine that end, to begin.
AUTHOR BIO
Robert Savino Oventile has published essays, book reviews, and interviews in Diacritics, Postmodern Culture, The Journal of Modern Literature, Jacket, symplokē, and The Chicago Quarterly Review, among other journals. His poetry has appeared in The New Delta Review, Meniscus, The Denver Quarterly, The Belfast Review, Ballast, and elsewhere. He is the author of Satan’s Secret Daughters: The Muse as Daemon(Davies, 2014) and is coauthor (with Sandy Florian) of Sophia Lethe Talks Doxodox Down (Atmosphere, 2021). He is a contributor to Local News Pasadena.
Read beautiful new poetry by Robert Savino Oventile in Katabatic Circus (Volume 1)
Angry Gable Press 