Though we may dream the dream of equality, we dream it on a scale much larger than ourselves. If we try to make a poem of this dream, it will be smaller than its origins. Being time-based beings we cannot escape compromise, concealing history with each new life, born to begin the accumulation of knowledge from zero to one and so forth.
Poetry is the frustration of such limits.
This piece is 2,250 words or about six pages long. The frustration of limits that takes place in the poetry of Jennifer Moxley is a process which distresses the equilibrium between abstraction and knowledge. Her poetry unbalances the boundary between self and not-self in a way that opens up fields of meaning and possibility that can exist in language and, perhaps, nowhere else. To read a Moxley poem is to submerge oneself in a world of chance and possibility while never being allowed to forget the limits that reality, the reality of the self and of the literal, imposes on such notions of utopia or freedom. Before we even sleep, the dream of a utopia, or even of autonomy, is one that is constricted and compromised.