If In Ruins
From Christopher Scott Thompson: “From prophesying an apocalypse, I’ve come to live inside of one – and I’ve tried to make something beautiful of it.”
You can pre-order If in Ruins We Must Live here: https://bit.ly/3xpMQjy
My Life as a Poet
My first poem was written by the flickering light from a kerosene lamp, in the homestead I shared with my family off a dirt road in Western Maine. I was 13 years old and steeped in the poetry of William Blake and the other early Romanticists. I don’t know how I knew this, but even then, I knew I would live as a poet for the rest of my life.
My early poems were simply imitations of the poems I had read, but the adults I knew seemed to find something interesting in them. Around age 15, I discovered the Surrealists, and was captivated by their dream-like imagery. Having learned about poetry by reading the Romanticists, I wasn’t much interested in free verse at the time. I started composing poems with surreal imagery but traditional form, not realizing that this would simultaneously alienate both modernists and traditionalists. I self-published two chapbooks while still a teenager, Eyes of the Raven and Under the Bright Dark. The early first drafts of some of the poems in The Book of Onei can be found in these chapbooks.
Around age 18, I first read Baudelaire, and translated a few of his Flowers of Evil in my High School French class. Baudelaire’s aesthetic of ugliness had a dark beauty that appealed to me, and I began an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to translate his work. Years later in Portland, ME, my reputation as a translator of Baudelaire earned me the nickname “The Gardener of Evil”!
If in Ruins we Must Live
I’ve been writing poetry since I was 13 years old, and in those 36 years I’ve produced a lot of work. Some of those poems are in The Book of Onei, and some are scattered through a handful of magazines that have published my work over the years. Many others have never been published or read by anyone other than a handful of people who know me. My dream, for all those years, has been to get my poetry published in book form. That dream is now coming true at last.
If in Ruins We Must Live, a new collection of my poetry, will be published by Gods and Radicals Press on October 1. Almost all the poems in this book were written in the past four years in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The book includes the twelve Surrealist Prophecies I posted here at Gods and Radicals a few years ago. Those were written in my first year here in the Twin Cities, when I was getting up at 5am every morning to commute by bus for an hour and a half to a terrible phone sales office. Something about that awful job produced the apocalyptic visions of those twelve prophecies, many of which were drafted while I was sitting at my desk trying to sell things for my employers.
Many of the poems were written in a tiny studio apartment in the early months of the pandemic, a room I sometimes didn’t leave for up to two weeks at a time. Those poems are less surreal, although they do draw on the imagery of urban decay Baudelaire was so fond of invoking. The last few poems in this book were written as the Uprising was breaking out, and Minneapolis-St. Paul was engulfed in street battles with the riot police and the National Guard. From prophesying an apocalypse, I’ve come to live inside of one – and I’ve tried to make something beautiful of it.
I hope you enjoy it!
Christopher Scott Thompson
Photo by Tam Hutchison.
is an anarchist, martial arts instructor, and devotee of Brighid and Macha.
