Recently in conversation Phil Hall pointed to a source of continuing interest in lyric poetry: that the personal is political. This poem reminds me the reverse is also true.

There’s no happy discovery at the end of Xi Chuan’s “Power Outage” such as there is in my sentimental framing of the ice storm stories. When the power goes out, the poem-speaker is cast into a disordered state. The darkness reveals small sounds far and near, traces of human presence in “wind chimes and a cat’s footbeats,” an engine that stops and a song that goes on. Loneliness and isolation are almost palpable.

Then “time turns back,” and darkness takes on a deeper tone, as living crows converge around a plate of crow meat, and blackness engulfs the poem’s speaker entirely. Despair acquires an odour and a name: power outage. The poem-speaker is pitched into an impossible, subsuming blackness. All he can do is summon a frustrated mutter as he recognizes his own wordless shadow.

Click the image above for the whole piece, & for more of Gillis’s writings on contemporary poetry.