Thinking About Attractors

a brief progress update

These days I’m writing poems from three deep attractors: the presence locally of glacial erratics, the clash of my three citizenships (American, Canadian, “kingdom”), and the practical implications of the resurrection. So, something from natrue, from my situationally conflicted brain, and from the realm of the leirotic (λῆρος / leiros, Greek for nonsense, from Luke 24:11).

For now I’m separating the new poems into three desktop folders that I’m treating as chapbooks: Erratica, Politica, and Leirotica. Obviously, I’m having fun with their dancing around “erotica,” implying the psycho-somatic appeal of all three attractors.

Yet not all the poems I’m drafting these days arise from these particular attractors. Case in point, this morning’s tanka:

	HVAC ON

	In the breathy space
	between off and off again,
	sunrise with snow.
	And to the south, ice crystals
        in the new day’s light—sun pillar!

Natural phenomena excite me. And the recent discovery of my lifelong Canadian citizenship. As well, theological thinking. Three horizons: surroundings, what moves inside my skin, and Mystery. What I find curious is that, twenty years ago, I very consciously adopted these three “horizons of simultaneous attention” for my strategy as I drafted the poems for the four Antrim House books that became Opening King David (Wipf & Stock, 2011). Now two decades on, I find I have been seduced unconsciously by particular attractors from each of these horizons. What to make of that?

My strategy now? Simply to note the curious nature of the case, and keep making poems. Even if I seem to be going ‘round and ‘round and ‘round the same three mulberry bushes, I intend to maintain momentum until I feel exhausted by it all. Or I get drawn off by an even more compelling attractor or two. We’ll see. I suspect it’s the nature of the artistic vocation: discipline + improvisation, commitment to this + openness to that.