Directives & Other Motivations

What I Engage & What I Want to Engage:

The peculiarly American interest in signs, and in 'conversion': typology, transcendentalism, pragmatism, modernism. The everyday, the ordinary, the small and particular, but those as more significant, even more sinister, than they are often said to be. "The vagaries of you and me."

Pragmati(ci)sm.
Uses, values, use-values. Know-how. Realist empiricism. Novelty & habit-taking, disposition. How a thing plays out. How it is found. Trying something out.

Poetry & Semiotics: ideograms, page-glyphs, speech-acts, CSP &/vs. Europe. Ordinary language: utterances performative and passional.

Poetics, both what is enacted and implied through forms and practice, and also the explicit philosophical announcements, whether exploratory or manifesto-polemical.

Form, forms, informings.

Women & Men---gender & genre comminglings, blurrings, floutings.

Long/Large poems & Small poems; large & small poetics.

Conjunctions of the verbal & the visual/tactile.
Materialisms, both productive & nefarious. Same for Science, & for Technology.
Textual scholarship, handiwork, archival exigencies.

Competing realisms.

History as always being determined, worked out, 'known,' in the present. (Olson, Howe)

Old, weird America. Errant, dirty, small, regional, rooted, perverse, silly, sacred, experimental efforts and practices (say rituals, also actual religions). Homemade/handmade. Primitive-lyrics. Visits, visitations. Things ephemeral, Lo-fi. Analogue technologies.

Violence & the Ordinary, the Vernacular: 'Life & Words'
How form and voice (style? tone?) in any so-called genre, emerges from, incorporates, and anticipates woundedness.
Writing as witness.

Forms of refusal. Forms of, allegiances to, silence.
Poetics of stuttering.
Wabi-Sabi.

Some Spectral Selvage

Nothings

Mad dash, talking the talk

Weave down the aisle, missal, mass, apse

sere collect, echoing orotund

acedia, erethism, dyspnea,

extending courtesy

transference: hail/hale to alae/a la,

obeisance, complaisance,

erose...PAROUSIA

rimy stimmung, round fiats
atmosphere tuned to advantage