Bøger af Christopher Kuhl

The music of words. Death. Daily life. Journeys. The transcendental. These are all factors in a human being's life. Some of it is the reality of that life in this world, this universe (we did land on the moon, place a rover on Mars, have a manned station in space). But this is also the stuff of stories, whether told orally, around the dinner table or a bonfire, eating s'mores; read in books, seen in movies, rendered in paint, told through music. My poems have always been like little stories; when collected, they tell a larger, more complex story. I am not generally a lyric poet, in the sense of using established forms (the sonnet, the sestina, the villanelle, to name a few). But I do write poems that have a lyrical quality in the sense of music: melody, rhythm; the shaping of word sounds to create for the reader an experience of the moments about which I write. So I am more a narrative poet, and the poems I write may be an obvious story, or may be more oblique; as the reader reads and rereads, he or she begins to understand a life or lives other than his or her own. And in the process, both writer and reader are changed. This book explores the stories of our lives; some of those stories are dark, some light, some rooted firmly in daily experiences, some more speculative. These poems individually have different characters, but by book's end, our lives have not been dealt with finally, in a definitive statement. And the closing poem shows that tenuous nature of being a human being: the last word of "Either/Or" is "why," unpunctuated, implying after all, there is so much we don't know. Feed the storyteller good things; this is only a beginning, and the storyteller needs his strength.

This is a book of questions. Questions as big and sometimes as overwhelming as the ocean. I-and I believe every poet-writes because of the ocean of questions, some risen to consciousness, some not; pushing us, threatening us to express the questions, find answers if we can or will, or overwhelm us and our selves. Although this is not a book about the ocean, blue and green, silver and froth, water images abound. Swollen with life, the ocean's water breaks, and as is the case with any artist, I am born. Ultimately, the questions in these pages are beyond any one posing, any one resolution. Rather, we ride the wave's edge and are reborn not once, but a hundred, nay, thousands of times across land and sea across the ages. In my heart, I pray a simple prayer for all of us balancing on that water's edge, surviving the voracity of the creative act: Shalom

A Myth of My Own Making is a collection of prose reflections about the mysteries of human life. Some of these include self-identity; relationships of different kinds; the impact of place on us; life, death, and the passage of time; and the nature of change. These issues have been fundamental world over, from ancient times to the present, wherever human beings have lived. There are no cut-and-dried answers, and maybe that's as it should be: what questions we ask and how we ask them may reveal more of ourselves than a "final" answer; they are steps on a journey. The advantage and appeal of a book like this is that it embraces all readers; readers can approach in any way they want, bringing their own reflections to bear upon those offered. These reflective stories are not meant to advocate a certain belief or set of morals; rather, they are meant to consider what it means, whoever, whenever and wherever we are, to be fully and wholly alive. Come, share the journey.

This is a book about the dark and the light, within and without. Moments of humor. Varied tone, from bleak despair, to plain silliness. Deals with history, philosophy, spirituality, identity, and gender issues. Also some poems built around current events. The voice is primarily gentle and thoughtful, but there are moments of anger. Finally, there are some experimental poems, with mixed genre, and playing around with poems which play with white space.

Wordsworth. Keats. Shelley. Coleridge. These are the poets many of us read in high school and found old, boring and irrelevant. What if we could have a conversation with them today? What do we have to say to them 250 years later? We are readers; these poets were readers. And we all are human beings. They were concerned with the same things as we are today: life, nature, death, the soul, the transcendental, all kinds of human interactions, who we are, the nature of time-all this and more. They speak.Read. Feel. Listen.And open your hearts.

Dust Blowing Across The Universe is a collage of creative nonfiction essays. They range from the whimsical to the serious; the autobiographical to what you might read in today's news; established essay forms mix with experimental. The essays are generally short, easy to read in one bite, though you will be thinking about them quite a bit longer. Read them in any order, each essay stands alone, both entertaining and thought-provoking.Dive in and enjoy!

We live in dangerous times. And the past century was just as dangerous, convulsed in several wars, two of them world wars, spanning the globe, but especially focused in Europe. Of these, World War II was especially perverted as the Nazis of Germany aimed at creating a pure, Aryan "master race," and to do so by killing all the Jews. And with Germany's self-proclaimed efficiency, they created a network of death and labor camps, complete with everything needed to capture, transport and exterminate six million Jews. This is what the Nazis called the "Final Solution" (as of 1942), and would become known by the Jews as "the Holocaust." Millions of people of all nationalities and beliefs were murdered by the fascists, but the "Holocaust" is the name especially referring to the mass slaughter of the Jews, like a burnt offering.Today, almost eighty years after the anti-Semitism of the 1930's and 1940's took off in Germany, people are forgetting about the Holocaust, some even denying that it ever happened. At a recent poetry reading, as I was reading a Holocaust poem, I was heckled by a group of young people who yelled that it never happened, and even if it did, "who cares?" I continued to read to the end, and knew, in a way I never had as deeply, the need to remember, not just here in the United States, but the world over.And hence, "Every Day I Will Remember." The collection of poems is in two parts: the first is about the actual carrying out of the Holocaust; the second about the relocated survivors' lives and those of the first generation of children born to them. The poems are built around my family who, except for my mother and her mother, were wiped out; my mother and grandmother came eventually to the United States as DPs (Displaced Persons). Other poems come from stories I read and heard from other survivors and their families.As expected, much of this is dark, especially in Part 1, but there are rays of light; after all, it took not only luck, but strength, courage, faith, and hope to survive. Part 2, after the war, has more light, but it too has dark moments. Yet, by book's end, there is joy: God preserved us. We must continue to remember, stand strong and united, and even in the face of tragedy, "live, life, live" (from the poem, "Rejoice"). Praise God. Remember. Shalom.