Dialogue:
Ann E. Michael and Alexander Etheridge
Ann E. Michael on Alexander Etheridge’s “Nights Valley”
It’s funny, but Alexander Etheridge’s poem feels like the sort of poem I have often written: simplicity of language and image pushing out toward the cosmos. Whereas in “Depth Cognition,” I chose to use, instead, the vocabulary of physics to play against the cricket soundings and the moist air.
But in both poems, the universe. Its largeness and its largesse—and incomprehensibility. Our resulting smallness.
What also resonates with me is paradox, in this case that being lost everywhere is home. I think that is the case with the cosmos. We can be lost in it but always it is our home…under the dark and dazzling stars.
It doesn’t matter what vocabulary we use, or which language. We are here.
Alexander Etheridge on Ann E. Michael’s “Depth Cognition”
I love the intelligence and nimbleness of thought in “Depth Cognition in a Rainy Season.” And it’s striking how it’s said here that math is more than what we usually make of it, as in, “Calculus is the Distelfink on a stranger’s barn,” indicating that our systems of thought exist in nature before we reduce it to our limited perspective. This is underscored again with, “while universal quantum mechanics/accomplishes unacknowledged tasks,” as if to say we have only begun to understand the grand genius of the cosmos. Bravo! Furthermore, Michael mentions the “querulous aspect of dry facts,” because, indeed, so much of our human knowledge is merely fact-gathering, rather than illuminating and profound. True profundity still lies beyond our grasp, which this poem so elegantly suggests.
For each issue, ballast asks pairs of poets to read each other’s work and respond in some way. We hope these dialogues will sound the resonances contained within the issue as well as serve to foster a sense of interconnection and community among our authors.
If you’ve been published in a previous issue of ballast and would like to participate in a dialogue, please reach out to our editors at ballastjournal@gmail.com.