POETRY VS THE LAW

Interview With The Author

    In March, Koolschrank Press published our first book, Philip Newton’s WAR and Other Poems, as a warning of what was to come, both from us and from the world around us. The book was chosen precisely because of its momentousness, its immediate relevancy.

    An American living in the USA, Newton had written the long title piece while watching the relentless perversion of that land’s laws by the Supreme Court. Poetry is the bardic account of life, death, and all they contain, and while capable of exposing the fallacies of civilization, poetry exists outside its laws. Art per se is extralegal, but travels faster and further than society because of the morality it alone can trace.

    Now, as the US implodes from the pressure of its poisoned legal exosphere, we at Koolschrank Press set out to interview Mr. Newton; we’d hoped to write about the external circumstances he’d observed, lived and was living through, together with the internal runecraft that birthed WAR. In response to our suggestion, he sent us the following essay, so we will now take you directly to the author’s own words. 

WAR and Other Poems is available at https://koolschrankpress.com/

PHILIP NEWTON:

In November, 2022, I sniffed the air and detected, riding down the east wind, robed in gray, wailing like lost Llorona, the impending arrival of death. This was nothing new: I had been tracking death for decades, had chronicled its features, its odors, the sweet decaying intervals of its carnival hurdy gurdy tangents, forecasting its path through the species; but this November a new scent was in the air. The gray spirit was not alone: Nine riders followed, six chained to death, three captive to the six, pulled along in the rank draft, moaning obscene vespers that floated with them in the national twilight. I sat paralyzed and watched their noisy triumph.

            I listened. I wrote. While all around me whirled banshee shrieks, and ghosts tore at my eyes, I scribed out the ruin of this work, the architecture of dreams rising and crumbling as they rose, stones cast backward and forward, up and down in time, a tarantella spun to mad music, staring down the mockery of hope.

            Days, weeks and months passed, and with them the procession of War, section by section, each more reluctant than the last to reveal what lay beneath the dreaming soil. Finally, in July of 2024, the work was done: nine passages haunting the future and declaring the fate that lay ahead, each praying they were in error and each cursing, certain they were not.

            War, like the five-peaked mountain of Meru, rises in terraces under a red sky. One tower, the largest, filled to overflowing with corruption, its stench a cloud around the mountaintop, feeds the endless hunger of the other peaks: power, greed, privilege and martial murder, felling soldier and child, father and mother, lovers, killers, detectives and thieves alike.

            Beneath this smoldering mountain crawls a moving human tapestry. Torn, burned, blinded by struggle, it nonetheless rises each day, digging, building, reaching even as it’s blotted out, for that which can never be erased.

            Battle passes from one generation to the next, an unbroken inheritance, a long line of casualties following soldiers and their children alike along dim streets in the hours before dawn. Daylight brings respite, homes warm with lovers, fields full of life, until night and The Nine once again reclaim the city cowering beneath leering towers.

            There is no answer, no cure. When justice is raped and the deformed offspring latch onto a nation’s throat, when the rot lies so thick and deep and broad on the Earth that no human effort will ever cleanse it, death is not the curse—life, existence itself, maimed and bleeding, is the accusation, the prosecution and the final muttered sentence.

            That then is the answer: Silence. Nakedness. Poverty. Bones. A stripping away and a paring down, slipping out of this useless husk and walking west, and west and west again. The long ocean is west. The current of our tribe runs west. The gate beneath the temple mountain faces west. West lies the path, in earth air and sea. We walk that way, washed by eternal sunrise at our backs, lighting the way before our feet, our shadows before us, guiding us to unperishing, undying oblivion.   

            Peace.