The Artistic Expression of Great Tribulations

We are human beings, flying by sight, trying to live — and at times to survive — the tribulations of an economic world in collapse, during the crash landing of the American empire as it has been known for the past eighty years. At the same time unfolds the redistribution of the biosphere’s rising heat, the consequence of planetary climate warming, unleashing a disruption of meteorological systems, and causing vast compensatory phenomena, devastating in scale. Earth sciences reveal that great reserves of volcanic magma may soon spill to the surface, through the eruption of interconnected megavolcanoes, like those beneath the Yellowstone region. Thus we live within this triple vibration: climate warming, the nearness of a destructive volcanic catastrophe, and the implosion of the American world, marked by the election of a criminal who tears down the rule of law and the economic order upon which his nation and its allies depended to escape imprisonment. We, the poets — both humble and grand — of this age of humanitarian tribulations, strive to express this tension and to resolve it, as calmly as possible, while remaining in contact with the forest and with life. We return again and again to the essential, and this return holds its own creative breath, its own path of expression, and its own spirituality — which, by reflex, becomes syncretic.