An Addendum to “On Poem Writing and Bow Hunting” by Alexander Shalom Joseph
Editor’s Note: The following is an addendum written in response to the author’s previous work, “On Poem Writing and Bow Hunting,” published by Twenty Bellows in August 2023.
Last year, I wrote an essay on poetry and bow hunting. How these two disciplines intertwine, how they teach lessons about each other, how in the end they both are about the unknown, about failure, about getting up in the summer gold pollen air and setting out into some wild in search of something. I still believe in what I wrote. I am still proud of that specific grouping of words which came to me as I watched the sunset fall over full bloom aspens, alone with all the green natural world, my bow in my hand. I still believe in the call to go out into the empty page of the forest, to witness the web of life, to go out as our ancestors once did, in ceremony and sacred, silent solitude. I still encourage those to heed the hunter inside, to learn to read the needled ground as you would some poem. But what has changed now is that in my searching, I ended up finding something out there that was more than hunting, more than harvesting, more than going out there to take something back.
I started bow hunting because I hate factory farms, because I wanted to be part of the process that sustains me. I wanted to honor the lives I take to eat. I still do. But what I found out there was more than a new yet ancient way of getting food. Through my years of my research on elk and deer, on where to shoot them, on how to cut them up, via watching them up close in the wild, via trying to stalk in on them, I found that instead of wanting to kill them, I came to love them. I came to see them as so much more than future meat but as beings so skilled in survival, so sweet and swift and special. I remember watching a buck with velvet antlers bounce up a ridge in thirty seconds, which took me an hour to hike. I stood in awe of his grace, of his strength, of how easily he evaded me and disappeared into the sagebrush like some high country ghost. What came to me then was not a chance at a shot with my bow but a series of questions. Who was I to go out into the splinter left of wilderness and take something out of it? Was I holding onto some colonial anthropocentric entitlement? Was I sinking into some fetishized fantasy of an indigenous lifestyle? Was I trying to prove myself as some tough western man? Am I more than this hypermasculine posturing and these problematic noble savage lies? Who am I to kill something so gorgeous and agile and playful? A deer I once took a shot at looked me in the eye right before I let the arrow go and I missed in its eyes I saw the same soft spark I see in my favorite dogs. I saw an intelligence there equal but so different than my own, a love and caring and a soul. Who was I to think I had the right to take the light out of those eyes?
For my birthday last month, a friend transcribed a quote from some new age-y, enlightened tech bro type podcast he likes. The quote described how we are all made of the same things: of wolf fur and dirt and dinosaur teeth and all these other fancy sounding, faux poetic images of nature and time. The quote rambled on about how we are some combination of all of this and that we are, as humans, the most complex living things in the world. And if hunting has taught me anything it is perhaps that attempted point of this quote is one of the greatest lies we tell ourselves, a lie which has devastated the natural world, burned the rainforests, tortured trees and animals, spread concrete over former fields of wildflowers and brown smog over once stretching blue skies. How do you measure the complexity of life? How do you compare one living thing to another and from that comparison deduce a hierarchy of value?
Beside the window of my living room, as I write this, the summer throbs with its heat and it’s birdsong and from the ground, flowers emerge, purple and pink and gentle and fragrant and impossible seeming in their beauty and delicate nature. Am I more complex than them? Am I therefore better and more worthy of life than the spider who has made a web in the corner of the room above my heater, which now glimmers rainbow in the soft morning light? And what about the deer who bounded up the hill ahead of me with such ease? What about the elk I once followed in the near night who called up into the air with some Rocky Mountain whale song, whose song made tears come to my eyes because in those moments I understand that they were speaking to one another, singing out into the dark, that they were so smart and alive and so much more than something for me to merely stalk and kill. Because I do not understand their language are they less than me? Am I entitled then because they do not work a job or understand our American politics, to go out into the woods with a weapon and try to pierce their lungs or liver or heart? Every bit of life is as complex as the next and deserves its life as much as any other. Me, the ants that have built a home in the wall of my shed, the fox that comes through my yard most mornings, my great grandfather, the elk bugling out into a dark night calling for a lover or scaring off the competition, the wildflowers beside my window: we are all the same and also so beautifully different and none of us should think of killing the other without some great weight on our hearts.
And it is with this weight that I retire myself from hunting. Instead, I take the lessons it has taught me and apply it to living, to paying attention, to remembering that everything around me has its own depth of experience and skill and ability so different than my own, but which through watching and being quiet, I can come to understand and love and learn from.
Wanting to hunt and be connected to a world greater than that of concrete and day jobs and presidents and far off awful wars, is noble. Perhaps more noble than most things these days. Even though in this noble pursuit, before you pull the trigger, ask yourself why this is how and get more from the answer than you would any meat you could pull off the mountain.
In my essay last year, on poem writing and bow hunting, I came to determine that the similarities between these two practices feed off each other, teach cross disciplinary lessons. This is even more true now, as I stay with writing, yes writing forever, but pivot from bow hunting. The latter has one more thing to teach me about the former. While I may have gone to writing hoping to be well known, to win awards, to be read and heard and respected, to write the next great novel, and while I may have entered the woods, bow at the ready, anticipating movement, looking to fill the freezer, I came away from both mostly enjoying the process, the attention I came to hone, with an appreciation for the way the light shines in the morning over the mountains and how special it is to be there, to see it, to write about it, to watch as other living things relish in the day as well.
About Alexander Shalom Joseph
He/Him/His
Alexander Shalom Joseph is a poet and fiction writer and the author of five published books, most recently the novella “the last of the light” (Orison, 2024). He has an MFA in Creative Writing from The Jack Kerouac School and an MA in English Education. Alexander lives in Boulder, works construction full time, and teaches a monthly writing workshop at two prisons in Denver. You can sign up for his newsletter at alexandershalomjoseph.com and follow him on Instagram/TikTok @alexandershalomjoseph.