Poem of the Week | August 11, 2012

This week, with Leo roaring, we offer up this new poem by Christopher Bakken. Bakken is the author of After Greece (2001) and Goat Funeral (2006), as well as a forthcoming culinary action/adventure memoir called Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table (University of California Press, 2013).  He teaches at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania.
 
 
 
 
 
Photo by Kelly Gorney

Author’s Statement:

“Confession,” along with six other poems like it, arrived during a strange and unusually fertile two weeks of writing last fall.  In each of these poems, two figures are falling apart in an imagined, somewhat allegorical landscape: the sea is almost always close; the mind is coming undone; and even the simplest objects seem estranged from certainty.  I think of these poems as dream songs and have scattered them throughout my new collection of poems, Impressions of a Drowning Man, which deals with the problem—or maybe the idea—of suicide.