0) I’m lucky to have a new, very small prose poem up at scaffold. Huge gratitude to editor Steve Gergley for everything he does for micro writing!

1) Part 2 of my conversation with the wonderful poet Hannah van Binsbergen is up at Zona Motel today, with my immense thanks to Hannah for her brilliant words and to for her editorial acumen and belief in the value of this conversation. (Come for the poetry, stay for a certain famous Vermonter who makes an appearance!)

2) Last but not least: at the end of next week I will be facilitating a poetry workshop with the poet in Upperville, Virginia. The poster is below and here is a link to sign up, in case you might be in the neighborhood — if so, it would be a delight to write poems together next week :)

More soon~

Hannah’s poems have captivated me for over a decade; in fact I once tried, with a patient friend who knew Dutch, to translate her work. In our conversation, we dug into what it is like to write across languages — although Hannah’s published books so far have been in Dutch, she has recently begun writing in English (or, as she puts it more precisely, in ESL), including a wonderful sequence of three short poems published lately at The Bulb Region. Hannah read from her recent ESL poetry as part of the May 2026 Night Light poetry reading series, which you can listen to here. She also introduced me to Juliana Spahr’s amazing book Everybody’s Autonomy, which was a joy to read in preparation for our conversation (Spahr writes a beautiful first chapter on Gertrude Stein’s deeply pluralistic approach to writing in English, and the Stein quote that titles that chapter also titles this post). Thanks so much for checking out my conversation with Hannah, & keep an eye out for Pt 2 when it comes out August 12th :)

This is still not quite writing about poetry, but I wanted to share some exciting things that have been going on over here, or will be going on soon:

1. I was very grateful to Lee Potts at Stone Circle Review for publishing a new poem of mine, “Moral” — it’s the leadoff poem of a new manuscript I’m working on, and it features Chris Fleming and a mourning dove, among other things.

2. Back in March I got to be a part of a really wonderful reading at AWP, the Post-Pop & Friends reading at The Carroll Mansion. Now the recording of the reading is up on Bandcamp, and you can listen to it digitally OR get it as a cassette!

3. It was a real honor to learn over the last couple of days that three poems I had published in the last year have been nominated for Best of the Net — with huge thanks to Z.H. Gill, Travis Shosa, and Sarp Sozdinler for their editorial generosity:

   1. “Eleven Beers” at Burial Magazine (which turns 1 year old today!)

   2. “Black Metal” at Dodo Eraser

   3. “The Silver Cord” at The Bulb Region

4. I am really excited to be part of the next Ghost Harmonics reading, 7PM on July 11th at The Perch in Philadelphia. If you’re near Philly it would be amazing to see you there! Thanks to host Mike Bagwell for inviting me (Mike will also be reading on the next Night Light — stay tuned to the socials for info about that!).

5. Next up after that I’m delighted to return for another Dodo Eraser reading (the first one I got to participate in is now on YouTube!), which will be on Wednesday August 5th at 9PM Eastern/8PM Central online — RSVP by contacting the Dodo, to whom I’m very grateful for having me back with such a wonderful lineup.

6. Last and very much not least, I am excited to be trying something new for me later this summer: with my friend the poet Haley Hodges (who is also on Substack), I will be co-facilitating an in-person poetry workshop at Trinity Church in Upperville, VA on Poetry & Prayer. If you’re anywhere near my neck of the woods in VA, it would be wonderful to write together! Registration for the workshop is open here via Google Form — although the workshop does have a cost associated with it, please feel free to reach out if that would present an obstacle to your attending, as we have some funding support available too.

That’s all for now — thank you as always for reading, and more to come soon :)

Yesterday I was thrilled to have a new essay published at Zona Motel, a fantastic venue for new writing. The piece is in memory of J. H. Prynne, a poet who has had a tremendous influence on me and whom we lost in April.

Tonight I am very excited to be reading at the New England Visionary Artists Museum in Northampton, MA with Shana Bulhan and Eliot Cardinaux:

Lastly, next week on Tuesday I will be reading at Book Love in the Pinehills in Plymouth, MA with Susan Hunter:

that’s all for now — this space might be quiet for a little bit, taking some time to visit family in Massachusetts and put work down awhile. But lots of exciting things to come, I hope :)

I learned about Michael Ryan because he selected Noelle Kocot’s excellent book 4 as the winner of the 1999 Levis Poetry Prize. This poem is the closer of Ryan’s New and Selected Poems, another excellent book. There’s something specific about this one — the Chekhov quote, how the hyphens and em-dashes punctuate it like an EKG reading, the little in-poem rearview mirror that turns the d’s of dulled, dogged, daily into the b’s of because, blinded, bloom, beauty. I’m hoping to have this one by heart soon.

A few years ago I started posting poems on social media with the hashtag #smallpoemsunday, and an invitation to anyone who might be interested to share small poems they wrote (or ones they loved by other poets) once a week. I’d been sharing poems on social media for a long while before using this hashtag, but I’d begun to notice that social media seemed to privilege the smaller poem — which fits neatly in a screenshot, can be consumed at a glance — over other forms of poetry. Although I’ve really enjoyed the participatory character of #smallpoemsunday (& still do!), and the bounty of small poems it has surfaced that I might not otherwise have read, I felt there was a need for a bit of a countercurrent: something that pushed against the quickness and slickness of the small poem, subsumed into the stream.

In December of last year I tried another hashtag: #twopageplustuesday — admittedly cumbersome (and, let’s be real, less popular than #smallpoemsunday), I wanted to use this hashtag partially as an accountability measure for myself, to try to make time each week to spend with longer poems — ones that couldn’t necessarily be reduced to a single screenshot, that instead would settle into some duration across 2+ printed pages or multiple images in a carousel. I’ve really enjoyed spending some time with longer poems each week (most recently this showstopper by Ariana Reines), and I still hope to continue this weekly practice along with #smallpoemsunday. But even with both “lengths” of poem in play, something has still felt like it’s been missing.

Initially I thought the logic of social media pretty unilaterally privileged the short poem, but I think it also gives greater weight to another kind of poem, one that could be described or triangulated roughly using a constellation of words like: straightforward, direct, plainspoken, linear (in logic, narrative, image, or storytelling), clear, explicit, comprehensible, coherent, intelligible, etc. etc.

— in other words, I think social media is not always kind to poems that are too weird.

This is not meant to be a black-or-white statement: there are many poems, short and long, that are delightfully strange and that people share widely. (You might have one in mind right now.) But I’ve also noticed, in posting work by more experimental poets (even when they work in short, accessible forms, like Joseph Ceravolo or Russell Atkins), that sometimes the circulation of this kind of work is much narrower, and sometimes even presents active resistance on the part of the reader: is this even poetry?

To be clear, I don’t come to this experiment thinking that circulation is an unqualified good in itself for poems. I don’t necessarily believe the ideal fate of the experimental poet is to be read as widely as possible. But I am interested in the possibilities of participatory poetics to make some more elbow room for the kind of baffling, weird work I’ve written about on this Substack before and that has made me grow as a poet.

So here goes: for the first #weirdpoemwednesday I would like to share a poem by one of my favorite living poets, Philip Jenks:

This poem is included in Jenks’s collection My First Painting Will Be “The Accuser” from Zephyr Press. Jenks is the author of several poems I would consider among the best I’ve read, including this one from his Flood Editions book On The Cave You Live In, and the thing I am really drawn to in his work is the way he uses more experimental or surprising gestures within a broader framework of the lyric to tremendous effect.

In general, I’m hoping to let future #weirdpoemwednesday shares stand on their own unique 2+ feet, but I can’t resist saying a few things about this poem and why I like it so much. I love the way it opens with a pair of lines that flirt with the generic or cliché — “i lived inside of you / and there was more” — before torquing their ordinariness with some sonically and visually interesting phrase-sized lines: “a nodded parallel / sifted splitting in / mauve regress”. The double letters in each of these lines are a great recapitulation of the poem’s opening “i” and “you,” the way the “i lived inside of you” is echoed by these double letters cohabitating in shared words. The wobbliness of sense and reference, orthography and semantics, deepens with the conspicuously in-quotes “shines the rain” — this isn’t, to me, a recognizable quotation from a source I know, but there is an old hymn by Ruth Benson Lehenbauer that includes these words:

My Heav’nly Father gives me all good and lovely things:
The sun that shines, the rain that falls, the meadowlark that sings.

I’m glad to pay a tithing, one-tenth of all I earn;
It’s little when I think of all God gives me in return.

Emphasis mine. So if this is a quote from the hymn, it’s a bit off-kilter in that it gets the logic of the list wrong: it combines “shines” (describing “The sun”) with “the rain”, kind of like the blurring of the “i” and “you” we started with and that gets an extra dimension in the second stanza, which opens: “you produced me”. Then comes one of my favorite moments in the poem, the word “eyees” with a double “e”. I think this is a deliberate move that plays with redoubling like Aram Saroyan’s (in)famous “lighght,” tricking your brain for a quick moment: before you even subvocalize the word your brain is already stretching the “eye,” which of course rhymes with “i,” past where it would normally go if the typo weren’t present. The result is a fascinatingly prehensile effect, which also anticipates the double “look” in the following lines and the unique pairs of compounds that open the last stanza (“radiator and fan” / “starpost and atlas” — such great “a” sounds there!). I’ll leave the music and mystery of the last three lines to you to think about, and I also warmly invite you to share your favorite weird poem for #weirdpoemwednesday — if you do, please feel free to tag me here, here, or here :)

My first poetry teacher was my French teacher. Like many children of the ’90s I experienced a version of whole-language instruction in my public school English classes; this did not kill me, to be sure, but it meant that I learned what the direct object of a verb was in French class instead of in English. I had some great English teachers who taught me literature & poetry, of course (and I am forever grateful for the middle school English teacher in whose class we watched “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”), but it was French class where we actually got our hands dirty with the language, learned how it worked and how to get it wrong, how to mismatch tenses and forget auxiliary verbs. One of my most enduring memories of studying French was when we got to the unit with vocabulary on flowers, and our class full of unreconstructed mall-town teenagers was unable to name a single one, in English even, based on the pictures in the textbook. Right then and there my teacher — a Ph.D. in French & Comparative Literature, who’d written on Maryse Condé, Monique Wittig, and Marguerite Duras — halted class, marched us all outside, and taught us the English and French words for every schoolground instance of flora we could find.

In her book Mercury, Ariana Reines writes:

Love

Is an interruption or an aberration, a force in opposition to the ultimate inertia
of the universe,
 
Wrote Marguerite Duras.
 
Whether or not it is worth it it occurs. Whether or not it is to be believed it is.

I started reading Reines’s poetry in the early 2010s, at first for pretty superficial reasons: she was from Salem, Massachusetts, not far from where I grew up; her literary touchstones skewed Francophone, as did mine. I was coming of age as a poet just as Mercury arrived on the scene. I read that book, and Cœur de Lion, hungrily: I had been reading a lot of poetry collections, which are of course well & good, but these felt almost like the first books-qua-books of contemporary poetry I’d read. Cœur de Lion, in particular — in which Reines’s speaker skips lectures by Alain Badiou at the European Graduate School to be with “Jake,” the speaker’s ex-lover, and processes the sex + the relationship out loud with friends and with the reader — felt like a poetry-pharmakon, a corrective to the slightly-too-self-serious study of philosophy I was engaged in then as a college student. (If you know a philosophy major and want to do them a favor, consider gifting them Cœur de Lion and Katy Bohinc’s Dear Alain.)

These books introduced me to some of Reines’s central preoccupations as a poet: the problem of lyric address in a world where mass marketing’s ubiquity crudely assumes a “you,” the attendant difficulties with loving ourselves and others in this shared world, the lingering question of why we write poetry at all while the socius is on fire and American empire enacts unspeakable violence in the name of continued hegemony, but also: a New-York-School-esque poetics of friends whose initials and first names pepper the poems and give them a singular sense of intimacy, along with Reines’s widely-encompassing referential field of music and art and literature and esoterica (among many other elements). It was a real joy and a formative experience to read Reines’s new work as it came out that decade, culminating in the publication of A Sand Book, one of my favorite poetry books ever, an utterly monumental 320 pages.

I could write about several of Reines’s poems that have been with me over the years (and maybe I will, at a later date), but today I would like to spend some time with a poem from her most recent book, The Rose. I’m a fiscal-quarter-plus late in saying so but it was my favorite poem I read last year. Here, in its entirety, is “JACK & JOE:”

Today, as I’m writing this, is my mother’s birthday, so I can’t help but be drawn on this read-through to the beautiful, vulnerable stretch toward the end of the poem, in which Reines’s speaker articulates wanting “Someone who loved me to tell me / What a good job I’d done / & that it wasn’t my fault / My mother died” — but I’m getting ahead of myself. I love this poem so much and I’d rather not bludgeon it too badly with blow-by-blow analysis — instead, I’d like to read it laterally, in conversation with Reines’s earlier work and whatever other texts suggest themselves as being helpful for a reading of the poem; like Blake’s grain of sand, “JACK & JOE” feels like a perfectly microcosmic expression of Reines’s oeuvre and the things I love about her as a poet.

The title feels like a good place to start: we don’t know who “Jack” & “Joe” are, yet, but letting our imagination go a little we can hear some proximity to the nursery rhyme of Jack and Jill. In case, like me, it’s been awhile since you’ve heard more than one verse:

Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
and Jill came tumbling after.

Up Jack got, and home did trot,
As fast as he could caper,
To old Dame Dob, who patched his nob
With vinegar and brown paper.

Jill came in and she did grin
To see his paper plaster;
Mother, vex’d, did whip her next
For causing Jack's disaster.

There are, of course, variations to this rhyme, but let’s let these three verses stand for now. “Jack and Jill” feels like the right place to begin because the poem’s speaker, like the broken Jack and tumbling Jill, begins in a situation of trying to recover — figuring out where their UTI medication went, dealing with an “Ache / In my belly” and also the less specific, but no less acute, problem of “feeling a little empty” (we’ll come back to the various heals and patches for these problems as they arise, as well as the rhyme’s invocation of “Dame Dob” who is then familiarized as “Mother, vex’d…”).

I also like how the poem is titled “JACK & JOE,” which could be a plural subject, but then the first word of the poem is “Was” — the speaker has surreptitiously, invisibly, slid her “I” into the empty space between the title and the poem. Reines is no stranger to the oblique genderfucking power of Poetry and The Poet™, like in this snippet from “Thursday” (originally a beautiful chapbook by Spork Press, reprinted in A Sand Book):

I have a woman's heart
Is the name of poetry
My cock is so huge it touches my woman's heart all the way
Is the work of poetry

This month I have had four lovers
I have had real love for them
I hope never to see them again
I will hang latent in the dark like a bat

And hoot like an owl to hunt them dead

Quick interlude for this picture of a tiny bat Kristi & I saw the other day on our porch:

(The French for bat is really great: chauve-souris, literally “shaved mouse.” More here.)

The ends of the relationships between the speaker and her lovers also come with an attendant moment of clarity about those same relationships (those “I have… / I hope…” lines quoted above). Reines closes this snippet with crepuscular animal images, reminiscent of Hegel’s characterization (in his Philosophy of Right) of wisdom via an old symbol: “The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.” (More later on a very different context famously featuring owls.) In other words, we only come to understand a thing after the sun of it has set, or even later: like the aftermath of the aubade, after we’ve awoken & left its bed. This is, as “JACK & JOE” puts it, an “Ancient / Pull,” an almost gravitational eros that “J&J”’s speaker doesn’t necessarily want to look directly at, is maybe not fully ready to (self-)analyze:

[...] something tired and hopeless

I don't want to converse

With in myself.

Just before this the speaker quotes Frank O’Hara, specifically the two-word snippet “With quandariness” taken from “The Day Lady Died:”

in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine   
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do   
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or   
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega

This poem lays out a kind of binary that Reines’s poem picks up and runs with: O’Hara’s speaker is wracked with indecision re: which book to get for “Patsy,” whereas for “Mike” they know exactly what to get and “just stroll into” the store to get it, a (not-uncoincidentally phallic) “bottle of Strega.” In Reines’s poem, there are parallel tensions of the open & the closed, also unfolding on gendered lines: for one thing there are the two CVSs, one that got the med order but isn’t open and the other that didn’t get the order but is. These twin CVSs chime with the “vinegar and brown paper” in “Jack and Jill;” Wikipedia calls this compound “a common home cure used to heal bruises,” and Reines’s speaker — though unable to get her medication since it was sent to the closed store — would ideally be leaving the open CVS with that small brown paper bag they put the single pharmacy pickups in. & there’s the poem’s title again, too, “JACK & JOE,” which holds two names only one of which is attached to a definite description in the poem itself. (Both names are also ciphers for the everyman, i.e. “every man Jack” or “average Joe.”) There’s much more to say about this dyadic structure and how it plays out variously in the poem, but for now let’s focus on Joe.

Joe is the speaker’s recent sexual partner and probable cause of the speaker’s UTI. I think Joe is great as a character in the poem for a few reasons: first of all, despite in some ways (e.g. the UTI) being the inciter of the event of the poem, Joe is not a speaking role; we hear about but not from him. Also, the speaker’s relationship to Joe vacillates extremely as the poem progresses; the speaker seesaws between feeling concretely connected to Joe and being abstractly, ambivalently suspended from him:

I knew the way Joe
Was fucking me would mean
A UTI if not worse. It was
Worth it.

[...]

I'm tired from the energy
It took to ignore Joe's texts.

“It was / Worth it.” — Remember that snippet from Mercury we opened with? “Love // Is an interruption or an aberration, a force in opposition to the ultimate inertia // of the universe, // Wrote Marguerite Duras. // Whether or not it is worth it it occurs.” There’s an interesting progression from this snippet in Mercury to “J&J;” in between the above two contrasting quotes from “J&J,” the speaker meditates on how “there’s an inner / Prophylaxis that protects us from loving / When we’re pouring out our lust because / We’ll die if we don’t— / We can only do this with people we don’t know. // Each other.” So Joe is known, Biblically (& what a Biblical name!), but also fundamentally unknown, since that dynamic is what keeps the inner “Prophylaxis” intact. (& the deliciously self-undercutting “Each other.” picks up on Joe’s generic name, insinuating that this condition is perfectly general and not anything entirely unique to Joe as a person, from whom we never hear a word.) The sex was worth it but it doesn’t quite seem to break through to love as such, as with the speaker of “Thursday” from earlier who hopes never to see their four lovers-of-the-month again.

The speaker’s relationship with Joe is figured in shimmering water images+sonorities:

[...] The schooner

Weighs anchor in the harbor then

Departs. The water bears

No scar. The water bears a scar.

Listen to those r sounds. (I love thinking about Reines’s relationship to the r sound since she’s from the Boston area, where r’s can famously disappear from words but also be added to them, bobbing in & out of the language like a buoy out past the riptide off Castle Island.) There’s that dyadic structure again, too, the water scarless & scarred paratactically, not simultaneous but very close. I also can’t help myself from hearing an echo of the great William Bronk here, particularly his poem “The World” (which now I’m having trouble reading without pronouncing “anchor” like “Anka”):

I thought you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.

Reines is no stranger to water imagery, and here the nursery rhyme recurs again: “Jack and Jill went up the hill / To fetch a pail of water…” This is something I’ve always really loved about her work as someone also raised in a Massachusetts town that, just technically, touches the Atlantic. For example, in Reines’s poem “Bell” from The Cow:

The water needs a forder. Otherwise there’s no cutting through to something other. Other than the water. This could not brazen the sea to hold it hard, but the cords that attach us to something could, making this a kind of bath, a voluntary dousing, and not a liquid urging that is animal. We have to decide on our forsakenness to become smooth and hard as a rock that drops, that drops into the dark.

In case, like me, you needed a refresher: a “forder” — one who fords — would be someone who walks through a stream shallow enough to make such traversal-by-foot possible. This is a contrast to the “rock that drops,” which would go not across but down, like Orpheus, or Eurydice, or both, until only one of them comes back up. In “JACK & JOE” the speaker describes one particular act that might be semi-fancifully described as fording, i.e. when they “walked to my favorite convenience / Store.” This line is immediately followed by some rhythmic, repeated anchoring language that keeps us in this scene a moment: “Scared to leave. A little sad / To leave.” Let’s sit a second to make sense of this repetition, this small episodic section of the poem, and the significance of it occurring in the setting where it does: i.e., a convenience store.

(A quick aside: one of my other favorite Reines poems is A Sand Book’s “Open Fifths,” which I’ve written about before and in which Reines also engages with O’Hara, not to mention “Joe and José / Six Pack,” another pain in the stomach “from all the peanut butter I’ve eaten,” and other resonances with the poem under present consideration. In “Open Fifths” the maritime mode comes in to goof a bit on Stéphane Mallarmé:

“Nothing, this foam” that’s Mallarmé
In the poem called SALVATION or SALUTE or HELLO
Or HI.  If I remember correctly he was an English
Teacher.  Why don’t people remember that when they come
All day all over what he left behind, taking him

So Oedipally seriously, “me already
On the poop,” he writes I swear to God
Badly on purpose.  White shit.  Cream
Deth, the opposite of Prince. 

[...]

Tears on my pillow, silhouettes on the shade
Black words like falling hairs upon repurposed sailcloth
Shipwrecks in the cool whip mind of Mallarmé pirates highwaymen knowing how to hit
The glancing edge of badness where the setting sun’s acclaimed
By bolts of lightning falling fast into the hills

I won’t go into the richness entire that is “Open Fifths” here, but I wanted a Reinesian touchstone re:how complexly the sea is gendered; it’s rhythmical, expansive, & thereby also maternal, but also its foam is white as cum and many masculinities have cracked into disaster by thinking they could own its surface before it swallowed them whole.)

I don’t want to overly belabor what happens in “JACK & JOE” at the convenience store, since you’ve just read it yourself, but I do want to sit with the idea of the Convenience Store. This past month I finished rewatching all of Twin Peaks, which also will not brook a full summary here, but I do believe it’s noteworthy that David Lynch and Mark Frost situate some of the evil spirits in the show as living “above a convenience store.” Remember, earlier, how Joe was both known and unknown, somewhere in the Venn diagram of lust & love? The convenience store feels like a similar American ambiguity: it is everywhere but nowhere, it is small-business or big-chain capitalism but also the site of specific reliefs and basic human kindnesses: it has designer sunglasses but they are fake. Some estimates say that 50–60% of American convenience stores are owned & operated by immigrants. It feels fitting a) that Twin Peaks would situate its clearest symbol-characters representing Exploitation and Evil as a pseudo-economic superstructure on the back of such a place, and b) that Reines’s speaker would be on the receiving end of a particularly noteworthy small mercy there:

They didn’t charge me for this pair

Of white & gold fake D&G sunglasses.

I said silent words of thanksgiving

To the man at the cash register putting

One by one & openly the things I paid

For & the thing I didn’t into my bag. Then aloud

I told him thank you. He wished me a beautiful

Rest of my day. I had needed

Something free just then. To have beauty

Wished on me.

The word “thanksgiving” in this stretch of the poem was what first made me want to think about it in connection with Twin Peaks, which participates in a kind of surrealized American mythology: garmonbozia is the show’s name for pain & suffering on which the evil spirits like BOB feed, and it physically manifests itself as creamed corn. Corn is, of course, one of America’s ancientest crops, the cultivation of which is historically legible from its deep past of indigenous domestication through to the horrors of colonization and the contemporary exploitation of migrant labor. Laura Palmer, some might say the main character of Twin Peaks (especially the film Fire Walk With Me), also refers to herself (in conversation, fittingly, with a J-named lover, James) as being “Like a turkey in the corn.” This adds a unique shade to Twin Peaks’s Americana-y symbology via a bird that, through many eras and civilizations, has represented abundance, wisdom, and also: sacrifice. (Reines has written at length about the parts of her life that had to be surrendered to her mother’s homelessness.)

We’re coming up now on what is, to my mind, the most poignant part of the poem, the speaker’s meditation on what it means to exist in the aftermath of her mother’s death. Rather than look directly at this right away, which we should and we will but it’s hard, I’d like to take a detour through the ur-mother-daughter relationship at the heart of Twin Peaks; that is, the relationship between Laura Palmer and her mother, Sarah.

In The Missing Pieces — a set of deleted scenes and other B-sides from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me — there’s one scene which indicates that Sarah Palmer, Laura’s mother, might be losing her mind. It’s not the focus of the scene, to say the least, but she asks Laura if she (Laura) borrowed her (Sarah’s) blue sweater, and Laura asks, “Mom—what are you wearing?” Sarah cries when she realizes the blue sweater is draped over her own shoulders, & not for the first time. Laura says what she can to comfort her mother.

Sarah Palmer’s call for Laura, by name, is the ultimate appel du vide, sounding in this scene & the whole series through to its very end. But what about Sarah’s name? In the Bible, Sarah is the new name God gives to Sarai, Abraham’s wife, as part of the covenant. Some readings see this as a move from the particular to the general: Sarai as meaning something like “my princess” and Sarah as, more broadly, “a lady or princess, simply and absolutely without restriction, or the princess of a multitude.” The name Sarah is thus intimately connected to a notion of transformation, as when over the course of Twin Peaks we see (spoiler alert) Sarah Palmer transform from the heartrendingly grief-stricken mother in the pilot (“Mother, vex’d…”) to an embodiment of Judy, the show’s primordial negative force who may’ve been the creator of all the others, manifested in an act of violence (“…did whip her next / For causing Jack’s disaster”).

In 1937, the Third Reich issued an executive order requiring all Jewish women with first names of “non-Jewish origin” to adopt an additional name: Sara. This name would be printed on all their official documentation, as impossible to mistake as the red “J” stamped over most of the identifying information on German Jews’ passports. Reines’s grandmother survived the Holocaust; her mother’s first name was Sandra.

I’m saying all this to delay confronting the two miracles I firmly believe this poem works, since I can really only point to them, not offer explanations. The first is the last full page’s reckoning with what the speaker wants and feels after their mother’s death:

[...] I wanted

Someone who loved me to tell me

What a good job I’d done 

& that it wasn’t my fault

My mother died

[...]

I feel soft, no better than anyone.

I feel just.

soft, no better than anyone!! I read a small pun on just there too — it’s laden with the metaphysical architecture of justice, sure, but I also think it’s flirting with the much simpler version of “just,” its chameleonic adverb form: just wonderful, just be yourself.

The other miracle of the poem is the way it passes through modalities of language, e.g. from mention to use. We skipped over it earlier but the poem’s second line is “Les heures mortes,” in quotation marks. Later we learn this is a thought about a painting (or the title of a painting) the speaker remembers, and later still we read the speaker actually using the words, transmuted from French to English in an act of lyric alchemy:

[...] The heroine of nothing at all

Save the dead hours, the ones that leap

To their grave at the center of me

I can give all this up—

Like Laura Palmer — severely scarred by trauma, pursuing the death drive to its logical end, the Eurydice figure of Twin Peaks who leaps in and out of timelines and dimensions, thrown between dreaming & waking, between death & life — the speaker has a grave at the center of them & is constantly teetering towards the abyme, on the far side of which they’d give up everything, as in death. Lucky for us, the inhabitant of Reines’s I stops just short of this threshold, & instead exercises their freedom to speak.

The poem’s last nine lines are too good to do anything but invite you to revisit; I hope you’ll read them again and come up with your own gloss, via your own freedom to live in language and engage with poetry. I hope, too, that this poem of Reines’s (from, once again, this great book), & the meaning you glean from it, defers that grave at the center of us all; a grave which remains at the heart of our culture when we let it narrate us without speaking back (in)to it, exercising our power to do so. To me this is the ne plus ultra of what poetry can do: remind us this freedom exists, & that we have it.

This poem is by Steve Scafidi, an excellent poet I’m honored to call my friend, and it was originally published along with another of his poems in The Rumpus:

When Steve sent me this poem, I had to reach for the nearest handrail. I was trying to describe to him what I loved so much about it and the first phrase that came to mind was “tumbling tercets” (on the knife’s edge of silly and apt, given the titular laundromat of Steve’s other Rumpus poem). I love the way only 6 of its 21 lines end with some kind of stop-punctuation, that the clauses flow sinuously over & through the line breaks, treating rhyme with a gentle hand (“chores”/“ward”, the more displaced “roses”/“ghosts”, and the recurrence of the “waterfall”/“all” rhyme just in time for the last line). And the content of the poem is so quietly devastating: I’m a sucker for a contemplation that works itself out through images, scenes, snapping turtle and hospital bed, the complete perfection (in the Spinoza-y completist sense) that is “he died asking for his mother twelve times as if / from a list of his twelve favorite people.”

Check out both of Steve’s Rumpus poems here, & his most recent poetry book here.

Have you ever been a fool
I cannot describe my love

—Ariana Reines

I am very, very grateful to share something that is not an April Fool’s joke: MOUNTEBANK has officially been released into the world as of yesterday! 🥳

I am so, so grateful to Broken Sleep and my editor Aaron Kent for making MOUNTEBANK into a real, holdable thing (Aaron made the cover, too, which I love!). If you number among MOUNTEBANK’s readers, thank you from the bottom of my heart — I’m really proud of this book and it means the world for it to connect with readers, be on people’s bookshelves, get lent out and left on the bus and and and…

I have been really enjoying getting to read from the book, too, including at the March Broken Sleep Books launch and for a really wonderful event organized by Tyler Burn for Lo Fi Lit (I’ll share those recordings via social media as soon as they come out!). I am also hopeful that I’ll do a couple in-person readings in Massachusetts this summer.

I’ll leave you with the conclusion of the #soapboxpoem series, a set of poems/pieces of art/music/etc. that inspired MOUNTEBANK in some way. Here they are:

• Mark Kirschen

• Nerval

• Bill Knott

• Chaucer

• Klee

• Elliott Smith

• Ben Mirov

• Eugen Bavcar & Gaspard de la nuit

• Laura Gilpin

• Barbara Guest

• Osip Mandelstam & Kate Kilalea

• Judges 14:14

• Homer & Jeff Mangum

• Kandinsky & Gubaidulina

• Linkous & Stanton/Lynch

• Jamie MacInnis

• von Bingen, the Bible, & Debussy

• Sterne & Mitchell

• Guillevic, tr. Levertov

• Lamartine, tr. Shor

• Ronsard & Plath

• George MacBeth

Thank you very much for reading, and all the best :) 🎭

With about two weeks until MOUNTEBANK officially arrives in the world, I wanted to share an update on the #soapboxpoem series — poems, and songs, and other works of art that had some bearing on the poems in the book. Here they are so far:

• Mark Kirschen

• Nerval

• Bill Knott

• Chaucer

• Klee

• Elliott Smith

• Ben Mirov

• Eugen Bavcar & Gaspard de la nuit

• Laura Gilpin

• Barbara Guest

• Osip Mandelstam & Kate Kilalea

• Judges 14:14

• Homer & Jeff Mangum

• Kandinsky & Gubaidulina (this was originally going to be Kokoschka & Gubaidulina, but sadly I don’t know where my Kokoschka book is)

It has been a real joy to get to revisit these various texts leading up to the release of MOUNTEBANK — some of them have been in my life for 10+ years, participating in the weird nonlinear temporality that turns life into poems (and back). They are all part of the infinite debt that comes with reading your heroes and trying to emulate them.

This is one of my favorite parts of poetry, really — the way poems and music and art are a form of chosen family, elective affinities we decide to follow and revisit and create a kind of liturgical time from, set our watches by. (This feels especially true given the strange riptide time-lag most poetry books experience, where they are completed usually a year+ before they are published, so they live in the hazy memory of the recent past — it has been a lovely reminder of what’s actually in the book, especially since my head has been in a new manuscript for a while.) Thank you for following this line through the thickets of poesy, with more to come by March’s end~

I couldn’t be more excited about MOUNTEBANK’s imminent arrival, and before I say any more I’d like to thank the wonderful Aaron Kent, my editor at Broken Sleep, for everything he has done to make this book a reality (including the cover design, which is so perfect for the book and made so thoughtfully in-house!). Aaron and the whole Broken Sleep team are so delightful to work with and I hope you might consider submitting to one of their open calls and supporting them by buying others of their books (I’ve read and loved many a Broken Sleep book, most recently Annie Muir’s Middle Child).

To lead up to the release of MOUNTEBANK, each day in March I’m planning to share a #soapboxpoem on social media — the name is for a small series of poems/songs/pieces of art/etc. that inspired MOUNTEBANK in some way. The series is named for the origin of the word “mountebank”:

From archaic Italian montambanco (“quack who mounts a bench to hawk his wares”), contracted from monta-in-banco (“mount on bench”).

In other words, the guys who would jump up on benches or boxes to sell snake oil in the public marketplace.

So without further ado, here is #soapboxpoem 1/31: the end of “The Laughing Stone” by Mark Kirschen, which is the closing poem of his book Pier’s End (and gives this Substack its name). The poem is based on the legend of a stone that, once a viewer looks at it, causes them to laugh without stopping; only the humorless are immune.

Thanks so much for reading, and I look forward to sharing more in the #soapboxpoem series soon. I don’t want to spam your inbox too badly so instead of sharing each and every entry here on Substack, I’ll be posting the poems daily on Twitter, Instagram, and Bluesky and I’ll pop back here every so often to give an update. All the best and hope your March is off to a good start so far, as good as is possible in the here & now~

Sorry for the not-great pictures. This poem note will be short; there’s laundry to do, and vacuuming, and wondering if we are about to be at war. I don’t put those things together to make light of the situation we’re in; I just think our dailiness is shot through with it whether we want it to be or not, and this poem by John Ashbery is one that rattles around in my skull whenever I think of America bringing death abroad. My first touchpoint for the political Ashbery was “A Worldly Country”, published when the younger Bush was president. That poem’s saccharine and sometimes tortured rhymes (“There was no peace in the bathroom, none in the china closet / or the banks, where no one came to make a deposit.”) belied very real American bellicosity, imminent economic disaster, and of course actual torture. By contrast, “As You Came from the Holy Land” (first published during Nixon’s last full year in office) announces “the end of any season” in quite graphic terms: “the worms come out of the compost to die”, “that thing of monstrous interest / […] happening in the sky” — I don’t know. Poems do not stop bombs, or oppression, or anything, by themselves.

I don’t know what you all expected
I don’t know what you came to see
But if you’re feeling disconnected
You’re just like me, oh yeah

—The Buzzhorn, "Disconnected" (2002)

We are, in some ways, the most connected we’ve ever been. My phone can connect me to friends and family members in different states, different countries, on different continents. My parents have a digital picture frame I can add photos to instantly from five hundred miles away. The car I drive talks to my phone and plays the music I want it to play; if I were ever in an accident it would connect to a 911 dispatcher who would send someone to help me figure out my broken body, if it could still be figured out.

This degree of connection, this supersaturation of the networks that make up our living, could be the subject of a very long post on its own. But what I want to write about today is a trio of three poems — “« H II » linear” by Anne-Marie Albiach (as rendered into English by Anthony Barnett & Joseph Simas), “The Inner Gate” by Jon Anderson, and “The Desire and the Pursuit of the Part” by Henri Coulette — that are united by one thing: *dis*connection. The poems, as we will see, each register disconnection differently — sometimes at a social level, sometimes at a personal (or even psychoanalytic) level, sometimes at a concrete level (in the sense of concrete poetry), and also in other ways at the level of form — but it is unmistakably a (paradoxical) unifier for these three poems, each of which is a piece of writing I adore and have returned to many times, over a period of several years.

I want to look at them now because I’ve been feeling kind of fucked up lately by the paradoxes of connection — how it’s never been easier, in principle, to maintain closeness with people via technology and other means, but also sometimes it feels totally impossible, like the density of connection becomes instead this brutal thicket that I’m unable to navigate in finite time. I leave messages from dear friends unopened for days, even weeks at a time, unable yet to muster the kind of quality attention I want to respond with. My over-ideal hope here is to arrive at a grace adequate to my shame about all that, and also to think about disconnection in its more generative sense: not just to mean “unplugging” or “being present”, but taking seriously the stickiness and trickiness of being-with in an era of total omnipresence.

A quick disclaimer/recommendation/greedy ask by me before we get much further: these three poems together run to about 32 pages (75% of which total is the Albiach poem). I think it’s worth just taking some time to swim around in the poems first — with shorter poems on here I’ve tended to go through the text beginning-to-end, so that even if you hadn’t read the poem before you’d probably have a decent experience of the read just powering on through. But what I think makes these poems work so well — their strange, enigmatic qualities, and their partial resistance to being read linearly — are *especially* loud on a first, unaccompanied reading, so I’d be grateful from this place I inhabit of disjointed writer-reader temporality if you’d switch windows away from this post for now and read the poems. Here are the links again so you don’t have to scroll up: Anderson, Albiach, Coulette. (Also, if you understand French (or even if you don’t!), you can listen to Albiach herself read her poem here — it’s an astonishing reading, and in it you can see & hear the poem’s layout on the page function almost as a musical score, where Albiach’s pauses/lacunae have durations that sort of roughly match up with the white space on the page between phrases. It’s uncanny and really intense and beautiful and I love it dearly, return to it often.)

Here’s a picture of a possum to scroll back to when you’re feeling good to hop back in:

Sorry if that felt silly, but I hope you got to read the poems and enjoy them in all their multi-dimensional wildness. If you’re at all like me on a first read, you’re compelled but very, very confused, wondering what the fuck is going on in that Albiach poem while also genuinely wanting to know. And the Anderson and the Coulette are clearer, but they also have their mysteries: why does Anderson’s speaker have these moments of violent anger? And what is going on with all the characters in the Coulette poem??

I want to dive in, but now that you’ve been in the poems I want to say a little more about why disconnection feels like the thing that, paradoxically, brings these poems together. I played with a few different words before settling on disconnection: I tried alienation, atomization, disaffection, separation, and disjunction. None of these felt quite right. As a word, disconnection does two things that feel important: 1) it is a “dis-” word, emphasizing its notness, its oppositeness, its apartness from the ubiquitous connection we talked about earlier — a milieu that also would’ve been deeply relevant to these three back-half-of-the-20th-century poets in the heyday of ’70s/’80s mass culture. And 2), disconnection also feels less philosophically laden than the other italicized words above. Alienation brings us into Marxist territory, atomization and disaffection crow existentialism, disjunction makes me think of Deleuze’s disjunctive synthesis (which is far more affirmative and joyous than these poems seem to be, at least on the surface!). Disconnection, by contrast, is a thing that can happen to a phone call on a mountain road, or what they can do to your electricity after you’ve failed to pay the 90-day balance long enough. It is an everyday happening, even if we kind of hope it doesn’t actually happen every day. It can be anything from a momentary blip — I lose you, I get into a better zone, I call back — to an announcement of a new problematic of one’s life, like needing to call a million people to get the power back on or losing someone you love to the drift of life and of time.

^In the spirit of disconnection, of disconnected time, I started writing the above paragraphs in November 2025, and am picking them up here in February 2026. I mention the time jump because I listened to Ariana Reines’s recent audio post about the necessity of memory, about the work of remembering what & who you are. Here’s a snippet from that post, all transcription errors/unfaithfulnesses mine:

...There's this alchemical formulation that I believe also shows up in Kabbalah, about making your inside like your outside and your outside like your inside. That's how you — once you've achieved that accuracy, that kind of balance — you are able to make miracles. And, I think that part of the reflecting work that artists do, that this is the miraculous dimension of it: you are experiencing something within. And if you don't find a way to make it manifest, your outside won't be like your inside; there's a terrible disjunction. And it's the terrible disjunction, actually, that stimulates the need to create, whether you're summoning it, whether you're channeling it and it's coming through you to be brought into the human family or the family of living creatures, or you're creating it with your imagination. But there is something about this act that is so subtle and mysterious, and so transformative, and so healing.

This made me think immediately of these lines from one of our disconnection poems, Jon Anderson’s “The Inner Gate”:

I desired a single, terrible event,
The passage from which would measure time.

We’ll come back to these lines, and Anderson’s poem, but first I want to lay out something like a thesis re: disconnection, much helped along by Reines’s formulation above. In each of the three poems we’ll look at here, I believe there is a sort of dramatization of disconnection — there are elements that do not cohere, or that exist in opposition or conflict or tension. A feeling or experience or formal instantiation of disconnection is sort of like the inciting event of each poem. But then!, something really interesting happens: the poem reveals itself to be a kind of bigger, broader, almost transcendental field where this incoherence/opposition/tension/etc. plays out, and where the elements involved can continue to exist even without a perfect resolution. In fact, we learn, these elements or people might actually be closer together than the initial drama of disconnection at first made us think — and the poem, as an event, is what reveals this hidden proximity to us. It does this almost miraculously.

As Reines put it, the “mysterious,” “transformative,” “healing” work of the poem doesn’t result in a clean or necessarily happy ending, in the cases of these three poems, but instead allows the different characters/elements/etc. to exist in the fullest possible ways they can, spoken into a univocal Being by the poem itself. Here we catch a little glimpse of Deleuze’s famous formulation “MONISM = PLURALISM”, where letting things be different(ly) in the field of the poem becomes a capacious avenue for thinking about all the different ways they can be, even if from the outside those ways seem confusing or disjunctive or antagonistic or downright strange. And ultimately, this view of Being means we end up in a situation where pretty much nothing is really strange at all, at an ontological level — if we are all in this big field together, there are ways I can recognize even the otherest Other in myself — Reines’s “you are experiencing something within” — and make sense of the difference with what tools I have. In fact, even if I don’t do this work, similarity is still there, latent. Hidden.

“The Inner Gate” is collected in Jon Anderson’s book In Sepia, which was published in 1974, when Anderson was 34. In many ways the poem feels like an oncoming-middle-age anxiety dream; in fact, when the poem was published in Poetry magazine in 1973, it had an epigraph by Borges: After all, what is writing but controlled dreaming. Anderson’s speaker describes “walking aimlessly […] In a Mediterranean city”, without the kind of direction that makes up a solid life. The speaker confides, “I had lost track of memory.” This makes him feel far from the kind of memory work that Reines’s audio post identifies with the transformative and healing work of the poet — so Anderson’s speaker is stuck, in a very frustrating position for a poet or any kind of creative artist. In fact, in the poem he imagines himself in a kind of writerly purgatory:

This is an Elysian dream — not quite a nightmare, but not going anywhere fast either.

In the poem’s second act, the speaker picks out an individual Other from his own life as a focal point, seemingly like a kind of lifeline to try and escape these doldrums:

Perhaps this “one”, this person the speaker finds themselves following, is a former teacher or a successful writer or something. Let’s leave to one side the specific identity of the person, and Anderson’s acerbic description of “his comfortable, / Terrible submission to the traps of the familiar,” which seems borderline unfair. Let’s follow him, keeping in mind the speaker’s earlier vision of writing in “a small room”.

Here’s what happens at the end of the speaker’s following, when the man being followed returns home after saying goodbye to his friends:

There are a few ways to read what’s happening here. One is straightforward jealousy: the “bitterness” of Anderson’s speaker comes to a head and he imagines strangling this person he has followed, who has lived a life he once imagined himself leading — from the outside, this other life appears free of the creative frustrations, struggles, and vacuities the speaker himself has been struggling with. But there’s something else, something that broaches the ontological even in its obviousness: the followed person is a clear double for Anderson’s speaker. The poem is pretty insistent on this, not just in describing how the speaker remembers this person from “a former life,” but also in how the descriptions of this person’s living space echo the speaker’s writing vision from earlier: the window is a unifying image for both, even if the speaker’s room “Lay otherwise in shadow” while the person’s he followed is described more brightly, in terms of a “narrow passage of stars” and a “light” that is turned out before he goes to sleep. For another contrast: the speaker’s vision from earlier describes a “plain wood floor” and “bare white walls,” while the person the speaker follows has comparatively colorful and evocative “flowers / Below his window”; there’s also a little color pun hiding inside “ate & read” — i.e., the red of the blood that the speaker briefly imagines filling this person’s face, mid-fantasy of strangulation. To borrow a cliché, it’s like Anderson’s speaker sees this followed figure’s life in color while his own life is in black & white — or maybe, like the collection’s title, In Sepia. (How many of us, in the social media era, have done the same with someone we follow so effortlessly?)

Here, in the clearest possible terms, the speaker confronts the problem Reines articulates, of the inside not matching the outside. They envision themselves inside “bare white walls,” unable to write, and then find themselves in a “high-walled yard,” on the outside of the walls, fiercely jealous of the boring life they had so long ago decided not to lead. If they had not wanted to fall into “the traps of the familiar,” it seems they’ve fallen into another trap: one of resentment, jealousy, and/or anger.

There is a little bit of miraculousness here, too, though. Despite having said “no” to this life, the life of the man he follows through the city, and despite having “lost track of memory” as he said before, he still remembers this person, and is still connected enough to him to have this intensely libidinal experience “in the flowers / Below his window”. Despite their mutual disconnection — the man seems not to see the speaker, and the speaker has disavowed the man’s life, however envious he seems to be of it — the poem still occurs, is still able to be spoken. The speaker does not speak to the man he follows, but he speaks to us, the reader, about the man. The reader becomes a bit like a third term, or a bridge, connecting these otherwise disconnected parts.

Anne-Marie Albiach’s poem “« H II » linear” (first published as a standalone pamphlet by Le Collet de buffle in 1974) engages with this paradoxical field of (dis)connection, even at the level of the marks of writing itself. The very first figure of the poem, which we encounter in the title, is the letter “H”. It is placed in angled quotes with “II”, which Albiach herself reads as the numeral deux, two. (Already this announces a pretty baseline post-Mallarméan difference, of the letter vs. the number.) Visually, though, what else is going on? The letter “H” is written with two vertical strokes, connected by one horizontal one. “II” is what “H” looks like with that horizontal connector removed. The angled quotes become a little field, in which it is possible to play with connection and its absence, two lives lived in communication or severed — like Anderson’s speaker and the man he follows, or as we’ll see a little later, perhaps Anderson’s speaker and his beloved. (To recap the Andersonian violence chez Albiach, there is also a pun in the French: the letter “H” is pronounced like the word hache, which is French for axe, the ultimate tool of splitting we’ll see again in Henri Coulette’s poem.) Already the title does a little mise-en-scène-ing of time as a vehicle for disconnection: the eye moves left to right, and the “H” loses its connecting center.

Albiach’s poem is gnomic and carefully measured, with pronouns that don’t exactly develop into narrative persons, as well as verbs that seem to mark moments of intensity rather than specifiable actions. Reading the poem for the first time I was reminded of something Alfred North Whitehead wrote somewhere, I think in Process and Reality, about how metaphysics is always struggling with the insufficiency of language. If the world is « All verbs / and attraction » (from part VII of Albiach’s poem), our language of nouns will do a poor job capturing the processual nature of it all. The various empty spaces, indeterminations, and leaps across the white space of the page in the poem feel like reductiones ad absurdum of using nominal language to try.

Unlike in Anderson’s poem, there is not so much a dynamic of “I”/“Other” in “« H II » linear”. Instead there are pronouns — a “she”, a “they”, even the occasional “His” — set into conflict and conversation in interesting, angular ways. One of the poem’s primary figures is that of the “Chorus”, sometimes all-capitalized, a figure of the many that stands in pluralistic opposition to, well, opposition:

Albiach’s “she” here is maybe the same “she” as in the opening line, which in the original is elle n’ignorait pas — trs. Barnett & Simas as “she was well aware”. “she” doesn’t miss anything, in other words. There are moments in the poem that seem to point at a binary accented by gender, like the line « he was unaware » in section XV:

It’s tempting to read Albiach’s poem as setting up a kind of major/minor binary between the “he” and the “she”, one that echoes Hegel’s famous dialectic — where even if the “he” is further empowered by society and circumstance, his alienation makes him “unaware”, while elle, to the contrary, n’ignorait pas. This would be a very neat, b-&-w reading, but the poem undoes this binary as soon as it’s stated: it’s merely “an optical / grammar the result of its gender”, a thing our expectations render more than the poem itself does. It’s like when Dennis Hopper’s character in Apocalypse Now says, “You either love somebody or you hate them,” and in response to that sharp distinction Marlon Brando’s Kurtz throws a water jug at his head. To try to impose rigid difference, and squeeze propositional inference out of it, is the way to error.

It is very interesting to me that Albiach’s poem works as a kind of inversion of Anderson’s, in that for Anderson’s speaker the divide (between the speaker and the man he follows, as well as the speaker and his beloved, as we’ll see in a second) is sharply felt from the get-go, whereas Albiach’s poem seems to build it up and challenge it using sonorous fragments arranged carefully in space, like a field of stars. (Something to be said here, too, for the role of sound vs. the role of vision — Anderson’s speaker may in part be frustrated because he has only a visual connection to the man he follows, à la Albiach’s enjambed “optical / grammar” — in Albiach, as we’ll see, it’s the deeply aural figure of the chorus that might get us out of this mess.)

Maybe let’s linger on the issue of gender here. This is the end of “The Inner Gate”:

This moment, this ending that maybe signals another, bigger ending, made me so sad when I first read it, and I think it’s a testament to Anderson’s ability to create great portraits (with such pathos!) of traditional shapes of love when they start to fall apart. It comes at the end of the poem, when the speaker seems to have awoken from his highly-charged dream and found himself in bed with his addressee. “This is not love, but care” is about the least aubade-y thing one could possibly say to one’s lover; I read the “you” — who is never actually a “you,” appearing only as “your” and “Yours” — as the speaker’s spouse. It also puts the beloved/significant other/wife/“you” in the very difficult spot of not at all being the object of the speaker’s dreams. There is the possibility of reading a little bit of literary machismo into this: the speaker dreams of being a great writer, is in fact deeply anxious about it (as the earlier dream-vision of the bare room would have it), and enters into dream-contests with an absent father figure about this anxiety; the intrusion of the morning, a concrete lived reality where the speaker is back in his difficulties of not yet being a great writer, signals not so much relief from the dream-violence but instead a failure to dream, about as opposite from happily-ever-after as possible: These are the raptures of falling in space forever.

In Albiach’s poem, by contrast, the conflict of pronouns is deeply uncertain, underdetermined, and drippingly slow to emerge. The bit quoted earlier with « he was unaware » arrives almost at the very end of the poem, after several instances of masculine and feminine third-person singular pronouns (along with others, like “they” and “you”). Throughout the poem, the actions associated with these pronouns signal a kind of incompleteness — not a dissatisfaction, like Anderson’s speaker’s closing distinction between love and care, but instead a kind of admission that these pronouns on their own are insufficient, almost arbitrary in their scope and reference:

The “he” has no role, the “she” is feigning authenticity, and we are left unclear, totally ambivalent, about “which pronoun” is “of the future”. (I love the irony of Instructions:).

Contrast the fate of these singular pronouns with the poem’s most prominent figure, the Chorus, who I suspect also embodies & doubles the poem’s “they” in a few places:

I love those lines that read like litanies of/to the Chorus, among the poem’s longest: that italicized here, the rare affirmation that “the chorus says the crowd, compatibility itself”. I am entranced, too, by the Chorus’s relation to space in contrast to the ending of Anderson’s poem: instead of waking from the dream, falling away from the idealized dream-reality, and “falling in space forever” as a result, the Chorus seems like it figures a space being opened up for the poem’s she, he, and other elements to make sense together. This role requires a kind of neutrality, for the Chorus to be “a neuter […] figure”, “neither astonished by their actions / in space nor by their / division”. gratuitousness — what a word to describe this relatively capacious splendor.

There is also a connection here to the chorus’s role in classical tragedy, where instead of being enmeshed in the action themselves, like the individual characters, the chorus could comment on what takes place in the play with a kind of “distant”, collective sensibility, like an audience for the audience. In Albiach’s poem, as in ancient Greek theater, the chorus is a kind of already-mediated mediator, moving “towards the stage” to help pre-process the events the audience has seen toward a shared, non-singular meaning. I love the way Albiach’s poem ends with “this measure »”: measure as in the measure of the music, the point in the play when the parodos begins and the c/Chorus has entered. But this is also measure as in taking the measure of things, offering one understanding mediated by plurality and not (only) by the singular speaker’s perspective, which we experience in almost pathologized form in Anderson’s poem from earlier. This measure is a kind of closed, determined thing — it is a judgment just like a character’s judgment, a pronouncement signaled in part by the closing angled double quote mark (which, as far as I can tell, has no corresponding opening quote mark). But it is not final: when the quote closes, and opens into the white space, there’s the possibility that some new “pronominal / fiction” will emerge — in other words, that someone else will speak.

Henri Coulette’s poem “The Desire and Pursuit of the Part” is so fucking good. I go back to it when I need a reminder about the possibilities of philosophical poetry, about how a poem can think and sing at once. It’s in three parts, the first two in tercets and the last in couplets. As far as I know it was first published in The Iowa Review in 1981, making it the latest-published of our three poems under consideration.

The first part of the poem picks up where we left off with Albiach’s c/Chorus, inviting us to move away from overly-hasty identification and toward a model of distance:

I think this section’s urge to pull back and away speaks for itself, and requires little paraphrase. (& now the axe of Albiach’s title-pun is “in the stump,” not violently swinging to cleave elements apart but instead content to be part of a broader pointing-out of the fact that these elements are *already* separate: nothing here belongs to you.)

I also love the way that the second-to-last line here, “For the only one is the one before two,” echoes this line of Albiach’s: preceding him was naming her. (The naming is getting into Edenic territory, to which we’ll return in the poem’s third section.) The “before” is a temporal before, but also a before of “I stand before you;” like the separate lines of the « II » in Albiach’s title, Coulette’s speaker encourages us to stand before our surroundings and see them as separate, as nothing that belongs to us even though “the wind” might press us otherwise. (I think “the wind says O” puts us right back in the typographical register, too: the “O” is a circle. Even if its singularity “says one” somehow, it also clearly has an inside and an outside, and resists the comparatively formless wind’s constant whisper of identification.) I also think this resistance to the wind is a way to say a gentle no to the violent over-identification we saw with Anderson’s speaker in the flowers, his gestures at strangulation and violence out of frustration. The alliterative negation in this section takes a quite different path.

The poem’s second section — each was originally published on its own page, and since each runs to less than a page I’ll keep quoting them in full — realizes Albiach’s chorus in much more concrete terms, by introducing some characters & proper nouns:

There is such richness here. The end of the fourth stanza — its “shade / Of leaf” — acts as a little breadcrumb, a tiny moment of connection to the otherwise seemingly completely disconnected first section (like the middle line of Albiach’s “H”). My favorite thing about this section is how (save being also in tercets) it is unmoored, at the level of both form and content, from what has come before: unlike in the first section there is no “you”, and the lines run longer, helping us feel the duration of the road trip they describe. Because we are in unfamiliar territory, we get signals that whatever we brought with us won’t help us here: “The maps that case contained are of no use to us now”, we read, and later the speaker speculates on the relationship between the two new characters, Tom & Ned: “Is there something going on between them? Something / Unvoiced or never voiced in my presence?” Like the drama of the pronouns in Albiach’s poem, these names — shot through in their short monosyllables with an eerie familiarity — retain a kind of mystery, an indeterminacy at the very root of them. There’s also a fun nod to “Professor Baldassaro Bandini’s definitive text” which reminds one of how Anderson’s speaker describes the man he follows as being from “a former life,” the same kind of semi-academic nostalgia illuminating them both — though the name Coulette uses feels more tongue-in-cheek.

The last section brings it all home:

The cast of characters rounds itself out with the introduction of Jerome and Miss Coots, the latter of whom is in a garden which recapitulates that small Edenic overtone we heard echoes of in the first section; with Ned, Tom, and the poem’s “I,” I can’t resist counting the same FIVE as Albiach identified with her poem’s C/chorus. (A brief aside: Cinq le chœur, literally “Five the chorus,” is an important-enough line of Albiach’s to have been used as the title of her collected poems. And there’s another pun, too, which is that chœur is a homophone with coeur — the French word for heart.)

To my mind, this section of the poem recapitulates the step-back ethos of the first part, and there’s a little breadcrumb in the shared “November” to help signal this. The first four lines of this section abjure all totality: they say that to be a part is just that, to be one part in a bigger whole, which no one thing unilaterally determines. “A part, a division” makes suggestive use of italics like we saw in the Albiach poem, both a sonic & a visual marker in this case stressing a partial vision, punning on a/part while also serving as a kind of coda of the poem’s hugely successful formal device of offering the reader three disconnected sections, and inviting them to make what hay they can.

My favorite thing about this section is that it elevates particularity to the level of metaphysics and shows that particularity, in fact, has the upper hand. The “crab” puts me in mind of Prufrock’s “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” Coulette’s speaker doesn’t want to get that primordial, and doesn’t need to. Nor is Coulette’s speaker’s fate predestined like the spider-as-metaphor in Jonathan Edwards’s infamous “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

This, like Anderson’s speaker’s vision, is a bad dream. Instead of dwelling in it Coulette’s speaker gets up, braves the cold floor (not the ocean floor!), “And make[s] coffee.” In this morning light we hear from Jerome, who might be a cat, rhapsodized as “—O glove of light!—” (the O another breadcrumb!) and we see, voyeuristically, in a live-and-let-live near-total inversion of Anderson’s speaker’s watching, Miss Coots stoop to her garden. I don’t need to quote you the last two lines: Coulette’s poem arrives at a place where a pluralistic assemblage of details is perfectly sufficient. When I get to the end of this poem every time I want to thank god and call my mom.

Like the poems we looked at here today, I don’t think I can leave you with anything that quite amounts to clean-cut closure. But I have enjoyed dwelling with these texts and their various treatments of partiality and plurality, their perspectival explorations of what it means to traverse and transform the dense forest of connection we find ourselves in, in the middle of our lives and everything else. Maybe these poems will invite you to consider making some strange leaps in your own artistic practice, leaps that might be resistant to the kind of predictive algorithmic ways of curating our experience that seem so difficult to escape in the here & now. (More on that in a future post, if all goes well.) If nothing else I hope they surprised you in some way, as they continue to surprise me, with that infinitely fecund joy of good poems: they bear, & reward, returning to, even if (selon Coulette) they don’t belong to us, or anyone else.

I am still working on a couple longer pieces for this platform, one about a trio of poems by Anne-Marie Albiach, Jon Anderson, and Henri Coulette, and one about a single poem by one of my favorite poets writing, Ariana Reines. I realized, though, that I am maybe the slowest prose writer on earth — I like being able to sit with something for a long time, but that means these pieces have been in the proverbial hopper for months. I like the roominess of longer posts, for being in & with poems for a longer period of time, but I also think not every post has to look or feel that way.

To that end, I’m going to try out a series of Poem Notes, where I share a poem I really like and a quick note about why. These’ll be short, and I’m not sure if they’ll happen every Friday or every so often or what, but I desperately want to have an avenue for sharing things on here that doesn’t involve a total come-to-Jesus with my own extremely ponderous writing pace.

The inaugural poem I’d like to share for this series is “Lamps New-Lighted” by Russell Atkins, collected in his book Objects 2 from 1963:

Atkins was a very interesting and adventurously experimental Cleveland poet, and this poem feels like a high water mark of his unique musical and syntactical sensibility. (If you’d be interested in reading more, his Selected—World’d Too Much from The Ohio State University Press—is beautifully curated and sensitively edited by Kevin Prufer and Robert E. McDonough.) The poem is full of these beautiful moments of sound that remind me a little of Hopkins, like the poem’s deft dips into end-rhyme and the run of m’s in “dim, / mum and dream mysterious’d: loomed / like a drear’d history.” My favorite thing about the poem, though, and why I have it bookmarked & return to it often, is the way it frames its central image—the lamps go on at night and work their small magic against night’s encroaching dark, “making frail realm / against overwhelm”. I think of this poem when I have to imagine a little light pushing back against impending “overwhelm”, giving us a little lit room to see & to be in.

In the coming weeks, on social media, I’ll share some things that went into the making of the book—poems it’s in conversation with, art & music I owe a debt to in some of these poems, random other things. But for now suffice it to say this is a book I’m very grateful is seeing the light of day. Putting together a collection of poems follows no set formula in my experience, except the constantly vacillating roils of ear & gut, respectively; mine told me some things for MOUNTEBANK that pushed against what I thought a poetry collection should look like, or how it should work (M runs to 152pp, it includes translations even though I’m not a translator, and it has a “Bonus Track” that’s longer than any poem in the book itself, among other liberties). Tremendous thanks to my editor Aaron Kent at Broken Sleep, who saw these deviations from convention not as alarm bells, but as an adventure he wanted to go on with me. I am really glad MOUNTEBANK is coming soon, like a snake-oil salesman to a town square near you, once the spring thaw comes.

If you’d like a little sneak preview, the first six poems here are collected in MOUNTEBANK. (The last, “Keep Talking,” is included in A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems). Thank you so much to ONLY POEMS for featuring those, and to you for reading! More soon :)

1) William Bronk, from his book of three-line poems The Force of Desire:

2) This piece by Vito Acconci:

3) Stanley Brouwn’s This Way Brouwn, which you can learn more about here. (I found out about Brouwn and his work from Martin Herbert’s excellent book Tell Them I Said No, which if you’re looking for a post-holiday book to self-gift, that’s the one!).

I remember being in college and really feeling like I’d been hit over the head with something big when I realized that universals(/abstractions,/ideals,/etc.) sometimes hurt more than they helped. I knew I wanted to be a math teacher, and math-ed social media was full of anecdotes about how well-intentioned efforts at education reform had created serious problems for actual educators and their real students. I read about how lofty principles were leading to hours and hours of high-stakes testing for students, and heard from math educators how they felt unable to emphasize research-backed, student-centered, discovery-driven aspects of their practice because their evaluations (and, thereby, their livelihoods) stood and fell on how well they could teach to a test. I’m oversimplifying a lot of complicated conversations in education, here, but all I want to communicate is that there was something incredibly appealing, by contrast, in the narrow focus of the particular: “local solutions to local problems.”

In an assignment for an education class, I remember quoting this snippet from Deleuze: “A universal explains nothing; it, on the other hand, must be explained.” The thing that would do the explaining of the universal, I imagined, were many many sets of concrete circumstances—in other words, a universal or an abstract idea would make sense only if it spoke effectively to lots of real people and real situations in real life. For me as a very very novice teacher, this meant I had a lot of work to do to get to know the community I was teaching in, and then I could look sidelong at any Big Educational Principles™ because I’d be measuring them against the actual experiences of the people in that community. This, I thought, is the way, and it is clear.

Back to the three pieces for the moment: I think that the allure of the particular comes, in part, from the idea that it seems so knowable. William Bronk, author of 1) above, lived in Hudson Falls, NY for the lion’s share of his adult life. He walked the same paths daily for years and years, knew many of the townspeople through his family and his family business, and certainly would have had the strongest possible sense of the place. Bronk was also a master ironist, so I’m very far from suggesting that we should take his capital-U invocation of “Ultimate reality” at face value. Rather I think Bronk is offering us a tongue-in-cheek reductio, in two ways: first, the poem posits this place, which poet and speaker know better than anywhere else on the planet, as “Ultimate reality”. Then, after encrypting it in the cipher of a “zip code”, a literal number (what better figure for the real passing into the abstract?), something curious happens: the poem shifts from the third-person declarative mode of its first two sentences to a quick one-two punch, on the same last line, in the second person:

Write to me. Here.

Why would ultimate reality need to be written to? Is it ultimate but somehow insufficient? Also, I love the way this little poem ends: Here. For a long time I read that Here as being entirely a recapitulation of the zip code from the previous line, only this time indexed by the speaker: a zip code stays in one place even if the speaker leaves it (or dies), but the Here requires somebody fixing the reference of the adverb, like what in type theory is called a witness. Lately, though, I also want to read this little word—needless to say, homophonous with hear—as the same word you would say if you were handing someone blank paper and a writing utensil with which to write a letter. Here, like G.E. Moore’s Here is one hand. It presupposes an audience you want to talk to, write to, prove something to. Or that you want to give something to.

(A quick aside: the slipperiness of the particular was also something I learned about firsthand as I got further and further ensconced into my first teaching job. Any first-year teacher can tell you about how many cans of worms you’ve opened by October.)

This paradox, in which the particular gets more and more singular and specific just as it slips away from us, or requires another pair of eyes to confirm what we are seeing, deepens when we face up to how fragile the singular image can be. Vito Acconci’s “Reference Work: Measure, Weather, Location, Time” feels as cut and dry as is possible for a reference work: it picks out “one cubic inch of […] snow” and, like Bronk’s zip code, gives us enough description to, in theory, spatially locate this tiny white cube on the streets of NYC. But also like Bronk’s poem, we are stopped cold with the closing indexical: today. Acconci’s spatial description baroquely folds in triangulating references to so many surrounding objects—the curb, the parking meter, even individual panes on the door—but the “Time” in Acconci’s title is trusted entirely to a word that must be inhabited by a writer, a speaker, or perhaps a viewer. This single person, like Bronk’s aspirational letter-writer/addressee, has to hold the parallax view of the particular space of the poem and play a kind of external role, one of attestation—that what’s described in the piece is actually there, that it can be found.

This (brief aside: “This,” also an indexical, is an overlapping word between 1), 2), and 3)) brings us to 3), Stanley Brouwn’s piece This Way Brouwn. Before we spend some time with this very interesting work of art, just one more note about the difficulty of writing as a form: when you write something, you naturally hope a reader will have a response to it. But the shape of that response is, in line with the difficulties we’ve seen with 1) and 2), paradoxically foreclosed: the writer-reader relationship doesn’t always give the reader space to respond openly to the text. (Nothing is stopping you from writing in the margin, but many of us don’t; sometimes that response lives all & only in the reader’s head.) Or it can amount to an invitation to trade places: to write something new in response to what one has read, and become the writer oneself, in a new iteration of the relationship. The worst case, to my mind, is when writing seems to want to steer the reader’s response with an overly strong hand, manipulating emotions or browbeating with a kind of clunky morality that puts the reader in the position of only really getting to say yes, I see, I agree. (Maybe something worth writing about in a future post—too wriggly a can of worms to open now, I think.) But an equally difficult case is when the writing is such a totally open field that any response seems like it could have equal ground—a couple of times when I’ve tried to write about certain, let’s say, very experimental works, I’ve felt their indifference to sense basically playing the role of a Rorschach, not willing in any way whatsoever to determine a reply. This is freeing, as a responding reader, but paralyzingly so.

Enter This Way Brouwn, in which:

What he [Brouwn] did was to ask someone, "How can I get from here to another point of the city?" And he would hand them a sheet of paper, with a pen or a pencil. And, the passerby was asked to make the drawing. And what Stanley Brouwn did was to ask similar directions to different people. So on one side, you see someone who is telling him with very geometrical line how to cross the city, and someone has a much more smooth, fluid way of crossing the city. (Christophe Cherix, MoMA curator)

The premise of This Way Brouwn is beautifully simple and irreducibly participatory: like many of Acconci’s later works, it only takes its proper shape in the hands of people who are not the artist. Take a second to image-search “This Way Brouwn,” and enjoy for a moment the sheer variety of map-direction artifacts that were produced over the course of Brouwn’s project. (This one is a particular favorite.) One of the aspects that makes the piece so compelling is that Brouwn’s “ask” is a seemingly closed task: just asking for directions from one place to another. If both parties had a map there’d be nothing here at all, just a finger dragging along prescribed streets. But the way Brouwn invites the participants to put, not just their directions, but their whole mental models of the city on the paper—to me, that’s the real there there. The particular felt so straightforwardly knowable, earlier, in contrast to unwieldy universals, but suddenly now we see how people have come to know that particular: concept-ladenly, through a framework that leaves its fingerprints on the glass of perception. These maps in folks’ heads would be jarring if they didn’t gel with our own—or, if you’re like me and haven’t been to Amsterdam (in which Brouwn occasioned This Way Brouwn), you can admire how they simply sing with unbridled plurality.

(I’m no longer a math teacher, but I still work in math education, on curriculum. Right now I am working on a project that involves looking at lots of student responses to mathematical questions; if you have ever given into the popular myth that math is “black and white,” or “just right and wrong,” there’s really nothing like looking at thousands of middle- and high-schoolers’ responses to math questions to realize that math is a space of creativity, play, and way more 6’s and 7’s than you’d ever imagine.)

So the particular, then, is not exactly a stable, fixed, known thing. Instead it is a bit more like an invitation—look, here is this common experience we’re both having in space and time; tell me about it, from your end of things. Draw me a map to it. Find one cubic inch of it worthy of comment amid all the other things to attend to. Write to me. Here. Know I’m asking earnestly, wanting to know your answer, or answers. That, I think, is the open secret to all three of these works: Brouwn, whether or not he actually went to the places his participants drew him directions to, was interested in the shapes of their paths. Bronk, acerbic though he could be, had the warm heart of a practiced host, and I think his speaker means it when he sings Write to me. And as for Acconci: we know audience comes to its primary importance for him later in his career, but still, this early written piece is a “Reference Work”; in order for a reference to be, in any way, useful, it needs to be taken up by someone else in the future. I applaud the future that all three of these works anticipate, where the particulars they’ve chosen to attend to still matter, still concern others, & will be taken up in kind.

I’m trying to get better at thinking of this Substack as a more heterogeneous space—not just poetry, but also math, & also philosophy, & also (maybe) new creative work. Here is a small prose poem that came out of today’s post (title from here)—thank you very much for reading, and for your continued support in 2026; it means the world! :)

But: I think it’s important to note that social media favors the small poem. And for folks like me, whose primary mode of engagement with contemporary poetry just is social media, that is not without consequences. When I think about what poems I am going to post I often find myself scanning for shorter work, stuff that will fit in a screenshot, and that criterion is definitely not representative of poetry as a whole. So today I am trying something, which may not succeed but that’s okay: I am going to find a poem to post each Tuesday that requires two or more pages to show itself to the world, and I am going to invite other people to do the same.

If you follow me on social media, you can probably already make out the coattails this initiative is riding: in October 2023 I posted about #smallpoemsunday, a similar invitation to post small poems of any stripe. I am very, very grateful to everyone who has shared a small poem on #smallpoemsunday, one they’ve written themselves or one they just love by another poet, and this thing I’m trying today is in no way meant to disparage or (pardon me) minimize the small poem as a form. I think small poems require a tremendous amount of skill and inventiveness to execute successfully, and every time I read a small poem that really works I am grateful to the powers that be for having granted humanity the ability to experiment with language in probabilistically-parseable context windows. But the way the algorithm favors the short poem opens up a gigantic lacuna that I think puts us at risk of not seeing (much less appreciating) the contributions to the genre that run long — and not just epics, but also those poems that unspool for a decent scroll or a few printed pages, and are better for it.

So today I am sharing a new-to-me poem by a new-to-me-poet, Thomas Horan. “Moonslick Bay in Pain” has a killer title and leans into its three-page,-91-line length to make use of devices like motif and characterization that are much blunter instruments in the smaller canvases of shorter poems. I hope you like this poem as much as I do, and I hope you might consider looking around for your favorite poem that stretches past the single page to share for #twopageplustuesday.

You can read the other of Horan’s Two Longer Poems for free here.

At the end of the most recent Night Light poetry reading, I read this poem by the wonderful Nevada poet nila northSun. (Today I recorded it one more time and posted it on my pretty infrequently added-to TikTok, where two memorable lines from northSun’s “red flags yellow flags” are my header.) I learned of northSun’s work some while back when a person on Twitter posted a link to some poems of hers, including the showstopping “99 things to do before you die”. After some googling I learned that you could read northSun’s 1977 collection Diet Pepsi & Nacho Cheese via the Internet Archive (northSun has a gift for the compound food title; witness 2008’s whipped cream and sushi, the title poem of which, along with many others, is on northSun’s blog). After that I found copies of love at gunpoint and a snake in her mouth that I treasure.

There are few poets that can handle directness with the same panache and surprising variety & deftness as northSun does, and I’d like to spend some time with this poem of hers in particular for a few reasons: 1) I’m writing this on Thanksgiving, when surely there are many folks “home again” (or they will be, at the conclusion of their holiday travels); 2) this poem has in it, I think, a small theory of work that I want to unspool a little on a long weekend when I have the very good fortune of not working, which is a bit of luck I don’t take for granted; a substantial percentage of American workers do work on this holiday (some estimates put it at ~15% of hourly wage workers on Thanksgiving day) and, increasingly with the work creep that is made possible by the omnipresence of technology, lots of people end up working on their time off anyway.

northSun’s poem opens at the end of a journey; the speaker begins with a small litany of objects they have returned home to, including a line that has become a little epithet I whisper to my own aging Macbook: my dear sweet patient computer. But immediately the reverie of returning to the familiar is interrupted by new problems that cropped up while the speaker was away: the computer doesn’t work. Anyone who uses an older device in the era of intensifying system requirements knows this feeling — you download the new version of whatever app and suddenly it doesn’t load, or it is too slow to be usable. Or, as in the case of my own computer, Google Chrome gently lets you know that you won’t be able to update your browser unless you finally bite the proverbial bullet and update macOS, which system analytics say you’ve no space to do.

But the speaker’s tomatoes have waited for them too, a bright red foil to the computer after a (stanza) break: something alive, something that we remember is also fruit. More on the pun with “fruit” later, but it’s worth noting that the tomato is an interesting riff on the Edenic apple — coming after three questions that remain unanswered in the poem, the tomato feels like it’s not quite the Fruit of Knowledge of Anything in Particular, but instead dazzles with its sheer being there, its “bright red and heavy” presence a stubborn testament to object permanence ( the speaker has been away and unable to care for them directly, so it’s possible they’ve only been watered by accidents of rain and still they evince such bright lush life) — even the “and” is spelled out to take up more space, in a poem that includes three ampersands.

I am really interested in the nine lines that close out the second stanza:

& all my half-done projects
stayed that way for me
knowing
my truck weary body
was anxious
to accomplish something
maybe i'll even finish
one
before i start another

The half-done projects start on a par with the tomatoes — just as the latter “waited for me”, the former “stayed that way for me”. Reading only this far, you could jump pretty quickly into a pessimistic reading that sees in this moment the dreaded post-travel to-do list — arriving home to a suitcase full of laundry, and maybe some you left behind, all of which needs doing, folding, and putting away. But northSun’s speaker instead credits these projects with a kind of thoughtfulness, like they’re looking out for the speaker by saving her (in a nice little echo of the tomatoes) some low-hanging fruit.

We’ll get to the poem’s ending, but I wanted to think for a minute about the way this poem engages with productivity words like “work” and “projects” and “accomplish”. It’s not clear whether northSun’s speaker was traveling for business or for pleasure, but either way the poem situates itself at “home”, and it welcomes a problem that I think is growing in its difficulty: how to be at home without thinking about work.

When I was a teacher, I was horrible at this. I spent many of my waking hours outside of work thinking about work, including grading I hadn’t finished doing or an interaction with a student or a colleague I was rehashing/replaying in my head (along with rehearsing how I hoped the followup would go, since in the closed space of a school I was sure to see them again, and soon). Teaching is hard, and one of the things that makes it so hard is that it is virtually impossible in contemporary education for teachers to “leave work at work”. (My wife is still very much a teacher, at two schools to boot, and between her curricular and extracurricular commitments she regularly works days that stretch into the teens of hours in the busiest parts of the school year.)

Although I am not a teacher anymore, I still work in education, and I have a work computer that kind of hums at a low frequency I can feel in my back teeth when it’s lying around the house on weekends — full of tasks I didn’t make as much progress on as I might’ve hoped during the week, and could do a bit of with the odd few Sunday hours. (I have been trying to do less of this, working on weekends etc., but sometimes it feels completely unavoidable and I give in and open the gray computer at times og night when it’s the only light source left on.) Although I have tried (legitimately tried!) to make my work-life balance better, I have not found a surefire way to evacuate the residual guilt I would feel when I wasn’t fully planned for the next day in my classroom, or had a stack of quizzes I hadn’t even looked at yet — to truncate a couple of lines from northSun’s poem, “my […] weary body / was anxious”.

This guilt compounds in a way foretold by northSun’s next line: “…anxious / to accomplish something”. The guilt and badness I feel about not having my work stuff done isn’t really even 100% about the work stuff itself; it was also layered with the fact that any time I am working or worrying about work, I am not writing. northSun’s “accomplish something” is situated within the speaker’s earlier mention of “all my half-done projects” — the word “projects” is not elaborated on, so we don’t know what kinds of projects in particular we’re in the midst of, and I think this means we can understand “projects” as being inclusive of artistic and personal projects too.

What strikes me so hard in northSun’s poem is how different, and how much more generative, its use of the word “anxious” is when compared with the anxieties I feel about my own relationships to work and writing. In a sense, I am anxious to not accomplish something — in other words, I’d worry that I would spend so much time working or worrying about work (the latter being a frustratingly torpefying feeling, symptomatized by hours lost on the couch scrolling instead of working or writing) that I wouldn’t make any headway on poems or this Substack or things I want to do for my friends & loved ones, like review their books or plan their Christmas gifts or what have you. By contrast, northSun’s speaker is talking about a kind of inverse of this feeling — after hours of paradoxically mobile immobility, presumably driving their truck a long way before arriving home, the speaker is “anxious / to accomplish something” — ready to complete a project, to “finish / one / before i start another”.

I think of this poem whenever I feel that old anxiety returning, in an effort to take its negative character and transform it into a kind of stirredness to do something: to write a poem, call a family member, or do something around the house I’ve been putting off — any number of other things that could be “half-finished projects” in the most general sense. One way the negative version of this anxiety held such sway over me for so long (and does, still — although northSun’s poems are indeed magical, it’s not the kind of magic that, by an act of sheer voluntarism, disappears anxiety whole) is that these kinds of projects/to-do items proliferate and recur; there is always more laundry to do, always three new sets of tasks Cerberus-ing in your general direction that you hadn’t even considered the week before. But the end of northSun’s second stanza hints at how it’s possible, even doing only a little bit at a time, to “finish / one / before i start another” — i.e., it’s not a one-sided torrent; we can get things done too. The short last stanza of “home again” is a friendly reminder that a) there are joyful things and events imminent in spite of all we have left to do, and b) it’s ultimately okay to be in the middle of things, much begun with lots not done yet, lots left to attend to:

but xmas is around the corner
oh
i'm so all over the place
happy
to be home.

I love the full stop at the end — if you admit that question marks can occur mid-sentence, it’s the poem’s only one. In my mind this closing period (also a name for a spell of time) helps complete the poem’s portrait of home, not as entirely without problems (like troublesome computers and tomatoes that need tending), but as a place to pause, to rest, and to anticipate new projects, including ones we may be nel mezzo del cammin of already, like the lifelong project (pace Dorothea Lasky) of writing poems.

So I hope this weekend that you’ll have some time to attend to some of those projects in your own life; I’m hoping to do some reading, some writing for here (& of poems, too), and maybe I’ll finally put away the laundry that has been unfolded for nearly a week. I’m trying to write some things about poems by Ariana Reines, Anne-Marie Albiach, Jon Anderson, Henri Coulette, Vito Acconci, and art by Stanley Brouwn. I’m feeling very in the middle of things and I’m grateful for this poem’s reminder that’s ok.

The poem I chose to share today, “Moral Narcissism” (originally from ROCKS HAVE THE SOFTEST SHADOWS (2020), collected again in the tornado that lost our emptiness (2022) from which my picture of the poem is taken) is not entirely typical of Smock’s oeuvre: it has no mention of god, death, children, Ohio, or time, for example. I picked this poem because I think it manages an interesting structure despite only consisting of a title plus three lines. The first line is a dyad:

fossil, cloud…

What a beautiful minimal pair this is, along so many axes: a fossil is firm in its form, a permanent impression; a cloud is ephemeral, passing by. A fossil is made from something not moving for a very long time, whereas a cloud is always moving, persistent in its attempt to escape our field of vision, changing shape and dissolving into something new or unrecognizable.

The poem’s last two lines take an aphoristic turn and build in subtle ways on the first line’s pair of images. I can hear the dry, dusty clicks and scrapes of fossil excavation in the hard K sounds of “okay” and “like,” along with the brittle T sounds in “it’s” and “little” — and you can hear the transfigured water of the cloud in those looping liquid L sounds, “like your little life.” The last line seals the deal: “I have proof.” — here we end with the same F sound that started the poem in “fossil”, which subtly puts this “proof” on the side of fixity and permanence (even if little, like a trilobite chez Breece D’J Pancake). But it also enacts the poet’s ultimate privilege of coyness, withdrawal — we can infer that this proof is the speaker’s own life, but the brevity of the poem saves them from having to explain or defend why. Like a definite shape recognizable in a cloud for only a moment, the poem (whose conclusion is gently undercut by its own title) shares this holistic judgment and asks the reader to fill in the rest for themselves.

Many of Smock’s poems operate in the open field between poet and reader, where the poem is open and cipherish enough to give the reader many ways to complete the experience of the it. Take for example this one that Ben Niespodziany posted a little while back:

I’ll leave it to you to decide exactly what work the first line’s “is” is doing, if it’s making a statement about Time as a kind of character and what they’re doing (that wonderfully assonant phrase, “leaving Eden”, punning gently on the Fall) or if it’s maybe making a claim about the essence of Time itself. And what about “go through” in that second line — it has shades of consumption and a sort of exhausted guilt, maybe implicating the line’s opening “We” — but in what? Despite the title of the poem I shared today, Smock is not a moralizer. He will point and he will configure poems that open the puzzle box of existence outward for readers like us to see inside, and bravely go no further.

If, like me, you are entranced by Smock’s Traklish alchemy of primordial elements into small poems of great mystery & control, I hope you might follow him on the various socials where he posts poems directly. In addition to their digital lives, Smock’s poems also lead a paper existence in self-published pay-what-you-want collections (some of which have cover art by Smock’s son Noah). I hope you might consider picking one up (or several!), and supporting this brilliant poet, whose work is so much richer (in its treatment of mortality, poverty, disability, metaphysics, the midwest, and so much more) than I’ve been able to say here.

When I started this Substack I had a feeling I’d mostly be traipsing down the list of poets I really love and writing about their poems. So: “A&W” by Wanda Coleman, from her book Mercurochrome, an all-time favorite of mine. (This picture, taken in the place Kristi & I used to live outside of Boston, is a favorite of mine too — pictures of poems exhibit relatively little variation, overall, but I like this one for the way it glows against the strands of lights Kristi had spiraled around the handrails of the steps, and the way another poem’s title — “COMMITMENT” — shows through from the preceding page, a shadow I will always associate with the fact that I was falling in love with the person I was soon to marry and move to Virginia to build a life with.)

There are so many things to love about this poem, but I’d like to start with the title, which I also read with the epigraph: —after Louis Zukofsky. LZ was the author of many memorable poems I’ll want for space to talk about properly, here, including the long poem “A” which anyone will tell you is a masterpiece. The title of “A&W” seems to play a little with both scope and register: at 24 lines, “A&W” is definitely not “A”. Coleman’s title, though, is longer than Zukofsky’s, which reads to me like a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun; also, that appended “&W” suggests a cipher of Coleman’s first initial, playing with a motif of self-insertion of her name that is a hallmark of her work (see “Wanda in Worryland”). You can hear something else in Coleman’s title, too, if you say it quick enough — Anew is the book of LZ’s “complete shorter poetry,” so the nod doubles. And lastly there’s the perhaps more literal, denotational piece: A&W is a fast food restaurant chain, famous for its burger combos and root beer floats. There’s a little pun on root here — the apt radix of the after poem — but it seems almost too cheeky to try and claim for this reading, so I’ll let it be.

I should say at this point that I learned about Wanda Coleman in exactly this kind of after manner. I read her because Ariana Reines assigned her book Mercurochrome in a class I was lucky enough to take when I was in college, studying math and philosophy with no poetry fides to speak of. Mercurochrome collects “A&W” and also includes a poem called “Card 78,” after Jody Azzouni:

More on the substance of this poem later, but a somewhat intellectually solipsistic young Tom was floored by this poem because Jody was my philosophy advisor at school. It was like Wanda Coleman, who passed away the year before I read her for the first time, had set up a breadcrumb trail meant expressly for me to find. This, of course, is a narcissistic reading of the actual truth, which is that Coleman was a remarkably ingenious and prolific writer who drew inspiration from a wide variety of sources, including (as Jody told me when I asked him about it) a copy of a poem Jody Azzouni wrote, printed on a business card, and left on a bus (or a train? my memory hides one vehicle with another) that Wanda found a copy of and decided to write after.

We will come back to this other “after” poem of Coleman’s, but let’s turn our attention back to “A&W”. One important image presents itself as early as the first two lines:

we spark lights
inside one another

This spark is a poetic archetype with a rich history and many valences. Coleman is writing after Zukofsky, who in section 12 of “A” quotes Hamlet (Claudius, specifically):

[...]
But that I know love is begun by time,
And that I see, in passages of proof,
Time qualifies the spark and fire of it.

So this is a love spark, and will play to Coleman’s strengths as a world-class poet of love & eros. I should also own up: Zukofsky quotes just the last line above of Shakespeare’s. I like how in my copy of “A” there’s a misprint that shaves off the whole t (& the i’s dot) in “it” — so the pronoun doubles down on the decontextualization of the quote; in other words, the “love” that a very assiduous reader may have understood to be the antecedent is figured instead as pure space:

We’ll return to the substance of this snippet from “A”-12, but for now let’s focus on the Shakespearean source material: Claudius’s claim that “love is begun by time,” and that “Time qualifies the spark and fire of it” (with a little “I see” in between).

This tendency to temper the fire of passion, in & through time, is borne out provisionally in the following lines of “A&W”:

The first line here is a delightful personal, a monostich Craigslist ad à la “have time, will travel.” Then the “no” and the “not” and the “better words” that follow, follow Shakespeare (and time) in “qualif[ying]” love — not so much attributing to it some transcendental, unifying function but instead being a kind of diagnostician, looking for special cases and dosage adjustments and how love could be expressed most accurately. Under this lyric microscope, the spark does not necessarily progress, then, into a conflagration. This makes sense, too, when we lift the rock of Shakespeare and find wriggling underneath a poet he may have read and even borrowed some lines from: Lucretius, who wrote in De Rerum Natura (tr. here Cyril Bailey): “Moreover, a voice is severed in every direction, since voices are begotten one from another, when once one voice has issued forth and sprung apart into many, even as a spark of fire is often wont to scatter itself into its several fires. And so places hidden far from sight are filled with voices; they are in a ferment all around, alive with sound.”

Now we’re cooking. This Lucretian line helps explain the inciting moment of Coleman’s poem, why the spark had to diffuse across and within two bodies instead of just one. Like birthday candles used to light each other in succession, Lucretius’s “voices are begotten one from another,” so there are at least two playing this euphoniously fecund game of telephone. And as the succeeding lines of “A&W” would have it, the one splitting into two is not logically far from an invitation to full fissiparity, the many:

Here the poem starts to take a wide lens: from the intimate we to the bigger world that includes “an unexpected stranger” and “beasts” and “tireless stars,” which Coleman in a nested metaphor likens to “tiny eyes” and, similetically, fishermen. These various elements blend all together in an act of accretion that also takes on an almost witchlike, incantatory mood (“gathering”/“casting”, which is a nice complement to the Lucretian register of the “voice” above — much will be left to say in the below about seeing rather than saying, but it’s nice that saying, here, too, makes an appearance).

Before we go further, a quick detour back through “Card 78” — this is another poem with eyes in it, although they are only named indirectly (“below eyelids”). There are two lines in this poem I’d like to sit with for a second:

amber moons echoing fleshy desire
cultured in a medium of light

Coleman is an incredible writer of the progression from the eye to the rest of the body: an ocular erotics which begins with seeing, and then the sight transmutes — through the registering of the poet’s vision in verse — into something much more tactile. Consider that the moons of the eyes “[echo] fleshy desire” and, by the end of the poem, are “responding only to the fingers / angling for an itch” — I love the echo here between “angling” and the fishermen we left off with in “A&W”, along with the really rich way Coleman plays with the letter “i” while also offering this meditation on eyes and sight: for example, there are the short i’s of “fish” and “itch”, along with the fact that the last five lines’ closing words in “Card 78” all include i’s. And in “A&W” the line we left off with (“like fishermen casting for fish seaside”) bookends a short-i-rich image with a long “i” on either side, creating a kind of binocular long view in the line. (This is the kind of marriage of sight and sound, of sound and sense, that I think makes poetry really special, and obviously why I think WC is such a great poet of form & technique, “cultured in a medium of light” and uncannily able to express its effects.)

I’d like to throw one more element into the mix here before we close out “A&W” — a sonnet by one of Coleman’s major influences, the undersung LA poet Henri Coulette:

Coulette’s poem is a remarkable figuration of a “pornographic bookshop” that invites, in the crisis of its burning, a panoply of proper nouns (stanza 2! stanzas 4 & 5!) to try and render what it means to see in some rich, pluralistic sense. It’s like an establishing shot, scanning the bookshop’s shelves — I’m also reminded of Peter Stormare’s character’s great moment in Dancer in the Dark, where he entreats Björk’s character Selma to think again about whether or not she might like to see various world sights and landmarks and life milestones; in response, she demurs, annihilatingly: to be honest, I really don’t care. The weakness of the Stormare character’s questions in the face of Selma’s resolve aligns with the first line in Coulette’s stunner of a third couplet:

It's too late for words:
The pictures! Save the pictures!

What does it mean to “Save the pictures!”? Maybe no more than Coleman’s line in “A&W” about “tiny eyes gathering visions”, an echo of “Card 78” and its “amber moons echoing fleshy desire”: in other words, “Save” may just be an injunction to hold and to preserve, even if only for a moment. Coulette’s poem, by ending in nigh-biblical “ashes”, is quick to recognize that this soteriology is only temporary, like a bundle of sticks held together for a brief jaunt only to be brought more efficiently to the hearth to burn.

Then there’s that line, the line of this poem: “The fires have leaped from our eyes.”

Toward the end of The Psychoanalysis of Fire, Gaston Bachelard writes (translated here by Alan C. M. Ross):

"...inner fire is dialectical in all its properties, a replica, as it were, of this fundamental dialectic of subject and object—so much so that it only has to flame up to contradict itself. As soon as a sentiment rises to the tonality of fire, as soon as it becomes exposed in its violence to the metaphysics of fire, one can be sure that it will become charged with opposites. When this occurs, the person in love wishes to be pure and ardent, unique and universal, dramatic and faithful, instantaneous and permanent. Confronted with the dreadful temptation, the Pasiphaé of Vielé-Griffin murmurs:

A hot breath inflames my cheeks, a glacial chill turns me to ice . . .

It is impossible to escape this dialectic: to be aware that one is burning is to grow cold; to feel an intensity is to diminish it; it is necessary to be an intensity without realizing it. Such is the bitter law of man's activity."

This irrevocable push-and-pull lends a new coloration to Coulette’s killer line, “The fires have leaped from our eyes.” If receptivity is a kind of diminisher of intensity, as Bachelard’s characterization would have it, then Coulette’s speaker is clearing the clutter to keep things open for the pure flame, what Bachelard calls “idealized fire”. (This is what will enact GB’s dialectic within and across Coulette’s poem, signaled by the way the first couplet ends in the exclamatory “fire!” and the last couplet ends in full-stopped “ashes.”)

Bachelard has a few interesting things to say about this “idealized fire”, its clean burn:

"There is a joy in accepting limitations inherent in all joy of learning. It is insofar as it is joyful that a well-founded repression becomes dynamic and useful.

[...]

Purification alone can permit us to examine dialectically the fidelity of a great love without destroying it."

Clear as a bell we can hear in Bachelard’s “limitations” the resounding finality of Coulette’s “silence”, and in “Purification” we can hear the echoes of how it is “only the silence” that speaks, along with “the ashes, the cold ashes.” (If you read my first post you might also hear an echo of a line by Mark Kirschen in GB’s allusion to “learning”.)

But this feels like an even more important reading to bring back to “A&W”, which makes no bones about its amatory motivations — especially at the end:

“whatever we’ve recorded” recapitulates the “visions” and “fish” gathered & casted for in the previous stanza. (Stretching the biblical associations into a tendon connecting Coleman’s & Coulette’s poems, there’s a bit of a loaves-and-fishes effect when you put Coleman’s image of the fish in conversation with Coulette’s ashes and Psalm 102:9: For I did eat ashes like bread, and mingled my drink with weeping. Talk about dialectical!)

Coleman’s poem closes by saying one of the most beautiful things I think you can say about love, in direct contradiction to the Hamlet quotation we saw earlier. Instead of time cooling and diffusing the spark of love, for Coleman “there’s still so learnable much” even when we have already “recorded” that love — i.e., love is boundlessly reinterpretable, and as the last line hints, it’s not even hard work: wherever we put our words is our poem. Like Lucretius’s voices, “begotten one from another,” love feeds itself in others, and begets further, richer forms of love & its plurifold expression. Making poems becomes a way, then “to examine dialectically the fidelity of a great love without destroying it” (GB). And everyone can do it.

This poem has been with me for years and years as a kind of prayer-reminder that love is a renewable resource. When Coleman or you or me or anyone writes a love poem, what happens? The answer offered in “A&W” is that, in making a poem with love as its basis, the poet is “put[ting their] words” in the position to do what Zukofsky describes in that snippet we saw earlier from “A”: to attest, in their very being and being-spoken, the miracle “That closed and open sounds saw / Things, / See somehow everlastingly / Out of the eye of sky.” Every time this miracle happens we are saying that we see someone, and love them in a new and singular way that is somehow inimitable and infinitely repeatable; suddenly “The fires have leaped from our eyes”, “we spark lights / inside one another”, and the luminous story of love continues.

When I read this poem by the warm light of the staircase in the place I had moved into with the woman who is now my wife, I could feel that — without me having to do anything at all, really — the poem had given me the gift of being part of that story. Now, hokey as it may sound, I seriously say this gift is yours to get, and yours to give.