L. Ward Abel

                                                            

Magna On Magna Poet Speaks feature interview with L. Ward Abel, poet, composer of music (Max Able / Abel, Rawls & Hayes) and spoken-word performer (Scapeweavel). L. Ward Abel lives in rural Georgia, and has been widely published in the U.S., Europe and Asia, including White Pelican Review, The Pedestal,  Versal (Netherlands), Juked, Angel Face, OpenWide (UK) , Ink Pot, Texas Poetry Journal, Kritya (India), Words-Myth, others.  His chapbook, Peach Box and Verge, has been recently published by Little Poem Press (Virginia, USA).  Twenty of his poems are featured, along with an interview, in a recent print issue of erbacce (UK).  His new full book of poems, Jonesing For Byzantium, has just been published at UK Authors Press (London).

________________________________________________________________________________________

Question: Purpose or absurdity, Ward?  Is there “a love supreme” or a determinist sneer?  A little of both?  Do you think post-Darwinian tendency to reduce or compare humanity to mere beasts is progress or detriment?  Joy Davidman, sharp wit and later wife of C.S. Lewis recalled her former intellectual dark age thus: “Men, I said, were only apes.  Virtue is only custom.  Life is only an electrochemical reaction.  Mind is only a set of conditioned reflexes…Love, art, and altruism are only sex.  The universe is only matter.  Matter is only energy.  I forget what I said energy only was…”

Thoughts?

Answer: Certainly humans can become beasts, as we see every day in the news, with murder, terrorism, abuse of children and the elderly, and we have seen this throughout history.  How else can one describe a Hitler, Stalin, Mao or a Bin Laden?  But I am a naive person, and proudly so.  I have the view that there are universal choices given us all, and we make decisions based on how we see the world and others.  Now, admittedly the decisions we make may be the result of a bad childhood, trauma, even illness.  I have some patience with these “reasons,” but my patience is limited depending on the severity of the behavior.  That said, virtue is more than custom, it is indeed (to me) the product of choosing “a love supreme” as Coltrane would call it, something larger than we are, a blessing bestowed.  I’ll not give you my own religious beliefs here, but I will say that these beliefs are deeply held, and they effect my work as a writer and my relations with others. I feel there is a good and there is an evil.  And there is a reason for all of this.  Dichotomies in nature (cold, hot / day, night) are reflections of larger ones that are unseen.  Energy is indestructible.  Why?  Why indeed.