2. Afterword to Inside Passage

     The physical world, the world of animals and oceans and flowers and any person that is not myself, is other. As a poet, I do not want to humanize, or embody, or describe the other, but to relate to it. My poetry is a poetry of connections, of congruencies. To present, in an imagistic manner, or describe in the romantic way, or to embody as a humanist, does not involve love. The scientific vision necessitates the dissociation of the observer from the object. That is also the vision of abstract art, and it separates the artifact from the artificer. My poem is not me, neither is it separate from me. My poem and I are related to each other. I do not want to humanize the world, nor do I want to dissect it. I want to discover my relationship to it. This might be called a family vision. In that, it is a survival of all, or nothing. Myth enters here on the same level, myth is simply one way to explore relationships. Any kind of abstraction, or romanticization creates fictions of disbelief. I am on the side of all Noahs, all explorers who discover new connections. I and my poem and the tree are related to each other. The tree expresses leaves, the amphibian expresses fins, the bird its feathers, a stone its mass. In evolution, the greater the complexity of the organism, the more diversified is its range of expression and inter-relations. Poetry does not reflect life, it is a part of living; it is a natural a function as breathing or blossoming.

Copyright by Carolyn Zonailo: www.carolynzonailo.com, 2004