Christopher Kuhl

Feed The Storyteller Good Things Christopher Kuhl

The music of words. Death. Daily life. Journeys. The transcendental. These are all factors in a human being's life. Some of it is the reality of that life in this world, this universe (we did land on the moon, place a rover on Mars, have a manned station in space). But this is also the stuff of stories, whether told orally, around the dinner table or a bonfire, eating s'mores; read in books, seen in movies, rendered in paint, told through music. My poems have always been like little stories; when collected, they tell a larger, more complex story. I am not generally a lyric poet, in the sense of using established forms (the sonnet, the sestina, the villanelle, to name a few). But I do write poems that have a lyrical quality in the sense of music: melody, rhythm; the shaping of word sounds to create for the reader an experience of the moments about which I write. So I am more a narrative poet, and the poems I write may be an obvious story, or may be more oblique; as the reader reads and rereads, he or she begins to understand a life or lives other than his or her own. And in the process, both writer and reader are changed. This book explores the stories of our lives; some of those stories are dark, some light, some rooted firmly in daily experiences, some more speculative. These poems individually have different characters, but by book's end, our lives have not been dealt with finally, in a definitive statement. And the closing poem shows that tenuous nature of being a human being: the last word of "Either/Or" is "why," unpunctuated, implying after all, there is so much we don't know. Feed the storyteller good things; this is only a beginning, and the storyteller needs his strength.