Update

I haven’t posted here in a long while, partly because the effort it takes to write a post here seems better spent on longer private meditations, uninterrupted by the dialogue between private source code and rendered CSS. In a sense, it’s incredibly good to have this double-windowed mode of composition, but it’s also like living in front of a mirror all the time. It has also been difficult for me to get a sense of what it is that I can contribute by writing about poems, something about the New Critical method of close reading has felt less solvent. Perhaps that’s what was going on here all along—a kind of digressive failure to approach what’s on the page, a desire to write more elliptically about what isn’t there…

My ethic is still one of hiding, for the most part—I don’t think a poem, or any text for that matter, can be apprehended as valuable until a long time has passed. Maybe I’m just talking about my own writing—I have a neurosis when it comes to revisiting my prose—but it does seem to apply to the editorial process. There are poems I wrote in 2017 which I can only say with some confidence are alright now; at the time, it was impossible to make such evaluations. And beyond the question of evaluation, I’d even say it was impossible for me to enjoy reading that work at all. I often feel like… the opposite of Orpheus. If the Gods told me I had to look at Eurydice in order to save her, I would simply plug my ears and run in order to avoid giving any sort of backwards glance.

I also get a sense that public projects like this one, or attempts to make a kind of casual public presence, are merely maintained out of economic striving. Why should I post anything here at all, other than for the eventual kûdos? Now, even if this is true, it would not be a reason to devalue the enterprise. I might begin to take notes here for the public, in part as an experiment in voice: What does it mean to write to “nobody in particular”?