Luke Munson’s poems, “Peire Vidal” and “To visit the country of shadows,” appear in the Spring 2021 issue of Shenandoah. Here, Luke gives an inside look at his sources of inspiration: the political, the mystical, and the Biblical.
In the early 2010s, I was inspired by the political desires and aspirations expressed in experimental poetry and art movements. If language structures the way we see the world, then by making conscious formal and linguistic choices within poems, attitudinal changes might accumulate at a cultural and linguistic level, changing the way we see the world, in turn changing the world. It didn’t take long for this notion to deflate itself. I no longer see a straight line from poetry to emancipation, but poems can make us feel free. The most impactful ones do seem to change the world for a moment, and there’s something worthwhile in that. I started to see poems as magic spells, and wrote a series of poems to make that relation as explicit as possible. With “To visit the country of shadows,” I wanted to know: “assuming someone has already done this impossible thing, what steps would they have needed to take?”
I’d been itching to use the word “cubit” in a poem for a while, and this seemed like the right place for it. “Cubit,” an ancient unit of measurement equal to the length of a human forearm, is a word I’m only familiar with from reading the Bible with my family as a kid. Some of the weirdest passages were the ones containing architectural descriptions of Solomon’s Temple and the Tabernacle. These detailed instructions could be mysterious and grand, especially when read aloud, but they were also incredibly boring. I liked the idea of the mirrored box as a vessel to move from one world to the next while remaining completely stationary, with “cubit” connecting it to Noah’s Ark. Writing the poem felt like retracing my steps to find something misplaced, or following along with a recipe. The magic I was looking for was right about to happen, or had only just happened. It might be that expecting poetry to change the material and social fabric of our world itself implies a kind of magical thinking. Taking this magical thinking to its extreme opens possibilities, but also reveals definite limits. A spell’s fulfillment is also its banishment.