About the Poems - BL
About the Poems
by Brian Laidlaw Whenever the topic of the ecological apocalypse comes up, my own hypothesis is something along the lines of, “It’s going to get weird.” I’m surprised (and, I admit, sometimes morbidly entertained) by the flippancy with which people approach the environment’s un-health. I think of these poems as a performance of that absurdity. They are idiosyncratic in form and a little nonsensical in content. Their broken syntax reminds me of text messages, emails, tweets: they are in the world, but not of the world in a physical sense. And yet these are also “love” poems. I guess that’s my effort to recast the situation in a redemptive light: we’re social creatures, and we care about each other so intently that we forget to take care of our landscape. I’m not sure I believe that synopsis, but it’s a comforting one nevertheless.