Steven Karl on His Poems

These poems are culled from a manuscript, I HRT THE CULT YEARS: Empty Empire of Aftersong. The poems explore the desire to escape a crushing life of capitalism & (re-)create a community outside of “the system of things.” But like most human narratives—our desires for utopia are tinged with horror in the shadows, the manifest of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. The Cult Years explores a turning away from perceived corrupted Christian narratives & begins to explore counter-narratives such as mysticism & dark arts, all the while a hunger of power begins to destabilize both the participants of the cult & the poems. The poems are hinged upon a constantly opening/closing door. Like most forms of devotion, they are obsessive, moving freely from manic to mannered. Repetition is the entrance to worship & then repetition becomes the worship. First the words & then you are the embodiment of the words. The white space—an open field, or the space where the light breaks in an otherwise dark forest. The white space—the desire to be a part of the thing, only to find yourself on the outside in a swathe of blanked space—ghosts of ourselves, ghosts of others.