Matter ‘09

I’ve always been a bit confused when people refer to my religious poems versus the poems I’ve written about my family, or poems like “Thoughts on Human Beauty in the Y Locker Room.”  From the very beginning, I’ve considered all of my poems to be religious poems.  In their conception and in the labor that’s gone into them, my poems are all religious, though I can see how someone could possibly overlook the religious aspects of a poem like “This Far South”, which is a poem I plan on reading in Austin at Matter ‘09.

While it’s true that the poem is about living in the south, and specifically about some of the bad storms and hurricanes that we get along the southern coast, the poem arose from my readings of the Old Testament and the association between God and the wind as well as the various Hebrew words for wind.  I suppose you could say that “This Far South” is a poem about wind and a poem about storms, but to overlook the fact that the storm is God, or at least the manifestation of God’s power would be to misread what I intended in writing the poem.

Likewise, I’ve also written many poems that revolve around questions of time, memory, and loss, but I see even these questions as religious questions, arriving as they do at the larger question of redemption.  Finally, the most difficult part of being a religious poet is addressing the tension between faith and doubt, which is a tension I struggle with each day and has inevitably entered poems like “In a Ruined Churchyard” as well as the “Tesla Poems.”

-Kevin Meaux – Matter ‘09 Contributing Poet

• Kevin will read and discuss a selection of his recent poems at Matter ‘09.

• A special edition broadside of his poem “Meditation in a Ruined Churchyard” is available through Shechem Press.