McCurry

Poems, Stories, Essays

Menu
  • About
  • Books
  • Writing
Menu

The Title Poem

Posted on March 13, 2020March 13, 2020 by ChristopherMcCurry

I’ve always loved the word apocalypse. Saying it engages most of the mouth. It ends with the tongue touching the teeth, the lips coming together and then being pushed open by the final p-sound. Like a kiss. 

I nearly failed linguistics because I didn’t like the fussy nature of labeling sounds and movements of the mouth, but this word, apocalypse, is almost enough to make me wish I had tried a little harder. 

Open Burning, more than a narrative of a divorce, is a landscape, a mental and emotional one. The poems themselves are mostly narrative, but the organization of the poems, the movement from one to the next, resists an overall narrative arc. 

The reader and the speaker move together through a personal apocalypse. One that is sometime physical, but also emotional and psychological. What in reality is a divorce, in a dream is a Latin American film about two soldiers burying bodies as bombs begin to fall around them. 

The titular poem, recasts the end of the world, which in this era would be swept up into the collective experience of shared online expereince, as something much more immediate and intimate. Yes, pandemic. Yes, nuclear war. Yes, climate catastrophe. Yes, ecosystem collapse. Yes, wildfires. Yes, even asteroids. But also, you and me. Or you and your son or daughter. Me and my daughter. Trying to survive. And that’s a completely different kind of apocalypse.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)

Want Post Updates?

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 22 other subscribers

Recent Posts

  • The Title Poem
  • My Favorite Poem
  • Ode to Holler Poet Series and Eric Scott Sutherland
  • A Marriage Story
  • Top 10 Favorite Books of Poetry

Goodreads

Contact

christopher.mccurry87@gmail.com

Social Media

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Goodreads
© 2021 McCurry | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme