currents / recurrence

All language is driven by pattern. Much of poetry is the labor, as Adam Wolfond writes, of moving language from patter to pattern. Sometimes those patterns are visual (a shaping), sometimes mathematical (a counting), sometimes lyrical (a chanting), and sometimes a poem desires to inhabit all of these patterns simultaneously, shaping and counting and chanting their way toward the reader.

Over several sessions of both writing and editing, Amelia Bell arrived at (with? through?) just such a poem. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that her care and craft allowed the poem to arrive to her.

I love how this vessel of a poem is held (seeing holding) by both its shape and by the pattern of -ing words embracing it on either side. Those words cause the poem to lap for me, to create an experience of staggered ongoingness. And within that ongoingness, there are waves of so many different feelings: wanting, resisting, wavering, believing, escaping, angering, searching, rising, regressing, returning. Things move out and they move back. The story reaches and it flinches. The body resists until it can resist no more and finally accepts its ability to float, to be at one with the currents and recur alongside them.

As the waves of this difficult year continue to break upon and around us, I wish you the gift of embracing patterns, which might help you find something like grace.

gone hearing,

Chris