L. S. KLATT COMMENTARY

LITTLE PUFFER’S PHRASE BOOK
This piece began as a meditation on a specific moment, a midnight walk on a country road in the San Juan Islands outside of Seattle. In subsequent revisions, however, the biographical narrative gave way to an exploration of articulation itself. The poem, to the extent that I understand it, illustrates how violently inspiration comes upon the writer. Speech, music, imagery—all these fight their way to the surface just as the enthused “victim” struggles for breath. Visually, the poem concentrates on the chi rho, that cryptic ancient symbol Christians once used as code/abbreviation for Christ. By inscribing this monogram on the poem, I am in effect recognizing the mark of Christ on my own artistic process. But it’s also as if the itself, as ideogram, reenacts the tracheotomy, the x of the incision at the base of the throat. The rhyme in “Little Puffer’s Phrase Book” is irregular and slanted, the line lengths uneven, and these create an idiosyncratic music typical of my work.

THE PERSECUTORS
John James Audubon was reported to have said, “I call birds few when I shoot less than one hundred per day.” Audubon’s massacres in the service of his paintings, while troubling, suggest that there may be something inherently predatory in the artistic impulse. In one way or another, the artist consumes the very subject he attempts to render lifelike on the page. Audubon himself does not survive such scrutiny; in many literary treatments of the man (including this one!) he becomes a target and a trophy. In “The Persecutors,” I play with this idea of the artist as killer, turn it around, invert it, skew it, and come to a somewhat elusive conclusion. This is a poem in the vein of Stevens—image-driven and philosophical and skewed. What I’ve always loved about Stevens is his quick reach for the imponderable, and I take up this gesture as well.