God Wave

Author: Carlos Lara

Publisher: EVIDENCE (2018)

Edition of 80

“The first version of this poem was written in the summer of 2008. That manuscript was called Several Days. For fifty-something days in a row I sat at a typewriter and tried to write one hundred lines of poetry each day. I was forcing myself to write, and a lot of the original material revealed as much in a very hackneyed way. But, most importantly, I was learning to let my ear go. Only by pushing so hard against the truth of ‘having nothing to say’ was I able to learn simply how to ‘say’ what I wanted to say and to realize that that was both necessary and sufficient. Years later, the manuscript was retitled Several Night after I had turned all of those lines into prose, adding punctuation, and changing words and phrases of clarity into those of obscurity, based on their phonetic ‘sway.’ And then again, years later, I disposed of all punctuation, compacted the sentences into one long block of prose and called the thing God Wave. I don’t necessarily ‘believe’ in a ‘God.’ I like the word because it creates an overwhelming void in its wake that must be filled. And that word dominates the title which points to a surge text so full of particularly extreme juxtapositions of words and ideas that there is almost nothing one can say about it. It came from nothing and leads to nothing, but in the middle, where the poem resides, there is the potential for a massive eruption of the strangest knowledge. But it’s also deafening and therefore engenders silence. This is my gravid non-object.“–Carlos Lara