Monday, May 30, 2022

enthralling appeal



Being drawn into experience (of a person, a phenomenon, a text, etc.) responds to appeal as if being enacted by the appellant, rather than (as if not) by oneself.

It is oneSelf, of course: already receptive to experience of who (or what) evinces response—but one’s not being thrown by the experience (which would be impositional, like surprise, albeit welcomed).

A serenity may precede the drawing or be instilled by it. A play of engagement may be evinced by phenomenality, to be savored, maybe evincing enchantment
or a delicate entrancement.

Saturday, March 26, 2022

As: a history, an outline



As: a history, an outline” is a set of poems I’ll share by link here (at the end), composed 45 years ago.

During the summer of my 29th year, I got involved with a largely-disappointing tome of poems, The Young American Poets, a very thick thing which had been published nearly a decade earlier (1968, Paul Carroll, ed.). It had many good lines in its lot of forgettable verse. Nearly each poem had some good lines—“good” there mirroring my preferences. I underlined each.

Next, I copied each preferred line by typewriter (years before consumer “word processing” platforms came along), and cut each line from its page, resulting in many hundreds of short textual noodles. Then, during episodes of entrancement,
I grouped the lines on my floor, first as regions of tens of lines (piles of text noodles) that shared an emergent spirit of sensibility, as if each line had its own integral gravity.

Saturday, February 5, 2022

an ended call is called the ending



The week has been a crazy series of exchanges between me and ATT Internet employees who don’t know how to solve the problems they’re employed to address, re: why I didin’t have connectivity most of the time anymore—which is an irony of human being: needing connectivity in order to fruitfully complain about its absence.