push buttons and stir pots

Bradley Koetting is an atavism. A thing – like the working cowboy, Nature, God or sex – which persists, though someone somewhere is always sounding its death knell. A poet, writing not to please a writing workshop or an inner circle or his own ego, but from a bald need to communicate experience. Communicating it bluntly, honestly. At the edge, there's always the possibility of falling off, a “lacunal fall,” to use one of the poet's phrases. But that fall, that abyss has something in common with the dark “cloud of unknowing,” described in the 14th century Christian mystical text of the same name. Having the courage to venture out beyond safety and into confusion, to live in that unknowing, what seemed to be a cloud is found to be full of light; the darkness shines.