The poem that would eventually become “Paradise Lost” first appeared as a much longer and more robust poem under the title “from Lost” in a 2021 issue of Ploughshares; but even that poem was a fragment of a 124-line poem I was working on for a book-length sequence called Lost. The idea was to engage with Milton’s epic through a process of re-imagining—much like Max Richter with Vivaldi, Víkingur Ólafsson with Bach, or Miles Davis with Rodrigo—where the act of creation becomes both homage and reinvention. What remains of the original work, and what transforms through the artist’s interpretation?
The work, however, was feeling incomplete. Not because I still had eleven more books to go, but because I found myself in a strange cycle of maximalism and minimalism as the poem evolved. It began as a cascade of imagery and allusion but slowly solidified, as though molten silver cooling into a more solid state. I felt an impulse towards reduction, toward distillation—a paradox of artistic creation. I needed to work my way through that impulse and live with what came of it. You can never fully recreate the heat of making a poem—when the fire catches, there’s nothing like it. What I can do is consider where I started and where I ended, and in considering those two far-away states, hopefully some of the inexpressible magic of the process in the middle can be gleaned by you.
In approaching Milton’s Paradise Lost, I treated it like sheet music. I was not going to add much of anything to it at all. What I was going to do was strip bare what I wouldn’t say, what I didn’t believe in, and see what happened. I never feel belated to a poem, that a poem is an obstacle, or that I must note that my poem is after some other poem. Poetry happens in a raw, contemporaneous nebula of impossible sound, like an ever-young star being constantly born in a clouded void.
Milton begins Book One of Paradise Lost like so:
OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav’ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th’ Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.
And chiefly Thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all Temples th’ upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss
And mad’st it pregnant: What in me is dark
Illumin, what is low raise and support;
That to the highth of this great Argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justifie the wayes of God to men.
And I began Book One of Lost like so:
Of a first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that tree, whose mortal taste brought death
Into the world, and all our woe. Sing Muse,
How heaven and earth rose out of chaos;
Aide my adventurous song that intends
To soar while it pursues things attempted
In prose and rhyme. Instruct me from the first
Present with wings outspread, dovelike, vast. What
In me is mine, raise and support that. What
In me is dark, raise and support that. What
In me is dark illumine. Raise and raise
And raise the height of this great argument
And justify the ways of God to me.
The opening of Milton’s epic, that sweeping, inverted invocation to the Muse, calls upon divine inspiration to justify “the ways of God to men.” My draft mirrors this cosmic scale: “Sing Muse, / So Heaven and earth may rise out of chaos.” Here, the poem aligns with epic tradition, grappling with themes of order and grandeur. However, by the time I reached the final version––after Lost has become “Paradise Lost”––this invocation had undergone a dramatic transformation. The Muse, the heavens, and chaos are gone. Instead, the poem opens with a starkly human declaration: “I start with sorrow, / Then feign joy / In the rhythm method.”
This shift is more than structural. It signals a departure from grand external forces to an internal reckoning with sorrow, rhythm, and the constructed nature of joy. The stakes shift inward—there is no external providence guiding the poet, only the unpredictable dance between light and dark within the self. The emotional weight of this shift lies in the poet’s awareness that there is no easy transcendence, no divine intervention. Instead, the poet must grapple with rhythm itself—a guiding yet volatile force in both creation and survival.
The phrase “the rhythm method” is doing a lot of dirty work here. It suggests, among other things, both control and improvisation, a balance between repetition and unpredictability. Rhythm, in this sense, becomes the structural and emotional foundation of the poem, guiding its interplay between sorrow and joy. This inversion of traditional epic invocation asserts the poem’s defiant re-imagining, suggesting that meaning now resides within the poet’s capacity to endure and reinvent.
The emotional stakes in this intimate opening are heightened through the theme of inversion, which recurs throughout the poem. Light becomes dark, and dark becomes light. The play on inversion mirrors Milton’s “darkness visible” from his own epic, emphasizing the poet’s role in navigating both creation and concealment through language––itself an echo of Job 10:22: “A land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness.” The Miltonic patterning of sound remains, but it has evolved. Rather than serving a strict allusion to light and deception in the epic’s mythic narrative, the phrase in its final form becomes a more abstract, self-referential play on inversion. This suggests that poetic language itself carries both burdens and freedoms—allowing the poet to both inhabit and transcend inherited forms.
Sound and rhythm remained central throughout the poem’s development. In the draft, phrases like “rooted here / In ruin” suggest entrapment and collapse, reinforced by the repeated r-sounds. This soundscape echoes Milton’s descriptions of Hell and the rebel angels’ fall. Yet in the final poem, this ruin is no longer explicit. Instead, rhythm and repetition carry the emotional weight, interrogating permanence and improvisation. Recursion and transformation become the poem’s dominant forces, reflecting the dynamic nature of both music and poetry.
The line “Hadn’t it all / Been something else / Before?” encapsulates the tension between originality and artistic inheritance. The question lingers, an acknowledgment that every creative act is haunted by what has come before. While this line questions the illusion of novelty, it also reflects the recursive nature of poetic revision.
Each stage of the poem’s evolution reshaped its engagement with inherited forms. The invocation, the sound patterns, even the omission of forbidden—each choice was informed by an ongoing dialogue with Milton’s legacy. Yet through this recursive process, the poem became its own. The recursive act of writing allowed me to rework Milton’s themes of creation and rebellion through a contemporary lens, tracing a poetic lineage that spans from the epic tradition to the fractured rhythms of modern music.
This thematic journey through transformation and innovation is reflected in a key passage:
“But then I listen / For that color, that verb, / That mineral, that metal, / And after, the electric / Data of tattooed angels / Dancing on air.” Here, the poem accelerates through a sonic lineage of modern music, moving from the sorrow and defiance of the blues to jazz’s improvisational freedom, rock’s rebellious roar, metal’s ferocity, and digital music’s fractured experimentation. This musical progression parallels the poem’s own evolution, shedding its epic scaffolding in favor of something more fragmented and immediate. Like musical genres that draw from but transform their predecessors, the poem traces a lineage of poetic and cultural reinvention.
The thematic shift from divinity to a more intimate, human-centered focus is perhaps most evident in a line from the draft that may have been, in retrospect, foreshadowing the revisions to come: “We are the miracles of our mothers.” This image grounds the poem in earthly, generational wonder rather than celestial hierarchy. Creation is no longer defined by God or a cosmic event but by the lived experiences and survival of ancestors. By the final version, divinity is reframed, not erased. The tension between mythic aspiration and human autonomy subtly persists, shaped by the poet’s ongoing dialogue with the past.
Ultimately, “Paradise Lost” transformed through these revisions, moving from maximalist homage to a distilled exploration of poetic and existential dualities. Over time, the poem shed its overt allusions, evolving into something more abstract, self-aware, and rhythmic—a composition both shadowed by and freed from Milton. As in Davis’, Richter’s, and Ólafsson’s works, my approach was one of layering and reduction, allowing only the essential to remain. What began as a faithful echo of Paradise Lost became a re-imagining of the epic tradition—a song for this time, this place, and this maker of poems.
