The Anatomy of Moments

Hosho McCreesh’s visual, lyrical, haiku-like psalms are strikingly beautiful, and always striving for less.

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IN MOST OF MY WORK, but most intensely in this new collection, I am forever chasing the moment. Moments are the lifeblood of poetry. They’re striking, even cinematic — stopping us in our tracks, reminding us what poetry is. I often considered how rare the moments were over the 17 years I spent finishing Psalms From The Badlands. And while I’m not certain of much any more (a very good place to be), what I feel pretty safe saying about these moments and to my way of working with them, is there are at least three parts.

First, there’s “what is.” In this collection it was often a concrete image, or vision — either witnessed or front of mind. And the goal, then, was to recreate it. I tend toward the spare anyway, but with haiku-like work, I am striving for even less. In painterly terms, this feels like roughing in the main pieces, the shapes, the light and dark…and there should be both.

Next, there is “what it means.” This is far more nebulous, and also can run from merely observational to the intensely personal. Albeit unplanned, the thematic threads of this collection began to truly stitch together when the things that “were” and what they “meant” started to coalesce. They became an organizing principle of the collection, even blossoming into their own kind of loose form — what I took to calling a “psalm.” 

Lastly, came the unintentional construction of a specific mythology. When “what it was” and “what it all meant” started reappearing across multiple pieces, almost like characters — that’s when the collection finally found its deepest story and the themes of love, loss, struggle, and grief came into razor-sharp focus. Images that continually reappear take on their own thread or branch in the larger scene, and the book (and hopefully the reader) benefits from the slow build of a shared memory.

The repetition of both Japanese maples and weeping willows feel the most prominent for me, though there are surely others. That’s when I learned that I wasn’t just writing breath poems about New Mexico — I was grieving. And the collection suddenly wasn’t just about image and place — but something larger, a very human story, one we all realize we have no choice but to share. Grief and loss should, like Bukowski says, bind us closer together, though they rarely do. Turns out we humans still have a lot to learn. 

And so, this collection of images and words is an attempt to recreate both the original vision + the finished piece as a way to inform as to the heart and spirit of the larger collection. I hope these “psalms” mean, to the viewer, just some of what they mean to me — and that we all glimpse just a little something of our shared humanity. 

– Hosho McCreesh

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