Currently Reading: Context

A pip squeak of a eureka. It’s not just author and reader. It’s not just where author is in their life at time of writing, and where the reader is, in a place to receive or understand at the time. It’s where the reader is physically. I’ve looked shelves for what I’m in the mood for, or shelved things I’m saturated with but I didn’t consider the rate of thought in quite this way.

Nature poems seem abstract inside a clatter. Frenetic thoughts for a fast environment are just clatter inside a quiet context.
I was trying to sit in a quiet calm space and read Matt Rader’s Miraculous Hours (Nightwood Editions, 2005) and I couldn’t remember why, in a crowded bookstore with energy zipping around the room, it appealed. p. 44

Breathing we share ourselves.
Forced-air pant, helixed with dog hair and rat skin,
adenine, cytosine, thymine, from a vent
above our bed, we breathe in the house-
genome,

So it sounds fresh and concrete and clever to think of a house as having a genome. It makes sense as we take in its molocules and what we off-gas and rub off get absorbed into the house making it kind of like a living organism. But I get a so what and can’t read for long without tiring.
The resonance has dissipated. But its the same text. Why can’t I hear it? Fine, I turn to The Cost of Walking by Shannon Tharp (Skysill Press, 2011) and get pummelled by p. 3

This
is the crucially useless circus
in which I rehearse the bruise
I miss you.

I’ve read that before and thought it appealing to maudlin. Yet this reading it seems true of human nature and delicate and careful.
When reading with a much-to-do mind, I was reading too fast to let each word sink. I was looking for the good bits. Short lines say slow down. They parse it into smaller chunks because of density. I wasn’t taking that signal. Have I got used to a small portable screen and short lines mean scroll faster while long lines of prose have come to indicate, patience, go slow thru a thick text?
On a crowded bus, shutting out, while monitoring, the odd behavior of random off-med strangers or friendly spontaneous conversation circles, I could read with ease The Hard Return by Marcus McCann, his urban context, snapshot fractured bits. p. 46, Glass Jaw,

“This is junior A,
so vicious. I will regret that I don’t land
this punch — a wood finger finds the collapse
button behind my knees. There’s speed
then there’s this: the clock stops.

It’s moving faster than my beach-wave brain. It’s struggle and smart and appreciation wanes. Why? I look at Webcam Screencap of Jonathan As Francis Bacon’s Self Portrait, 1969 which starts,

When the world moves slower
than the mind. Faces
swirl, blurred not by the speed
of change but its opposite –
some material sluggishness – the mind
a camera whipping around
the world, too fast to focus.

Just so, isn’t it? Brokering in interesting frames of view.
Cue wave sounds, seagulls, distant nodes of conversations, people jumping at a volleyball and I get glazed. Just like conversing with someone who speaks quickly with detailed reading and quick exchange or someone who has written off the time as useless and will call it in with bland strained conversations of weather and is fine with that, one has to gear up or down. Can’t hear it if I’m mentally too far away. Can’t get my wavelength there that fast so the person hasn’t moved on.
On the other hand, This Won’t Last Forever by Colin Morton (Longspoon Press, 1985), p. 40-41 which I read before in a fast-brain mode and liked it well enough but here, it was delightful.

It was the morning after the night
I first read Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”,
but instead of waking up an insect
I woke up in the 1960s.
In the kitchen Andy is counting out
morning-glry seeds to eat with a glass of milk.
I have just written my first novel
and begun to edit my first magazine.
[snip 3 more stanzas]
I woke up in the morning in the 1960s.
It’s no picnic, I assure you.
The ’70s are still ahead of me and
I may not survive them a second time.

That’s the speed of my brain on beach. I could pick my way thru 98 pages of it and Coastlines for the Archipelago. Perhaps its a sign that a few poems thru them are set waterside. It makes sense. One resonates where there’s proximity and overlap. So by finding poems written that resonate, can one infer connection with a widely distributed community? If someone in the community you can hear well has a circumstance, health or opportunity, can you can speculate that something about the context can be predicted for others sharing the context? One may come to the same place from different cause and on different trajectories naturally. For example, haiku may be to offset a frenetic life, or to create an alter ego in disorder, or to be consistent with everything else which is controlled and aiming for grace.
In This Won’t Last Forever he also has a poem using the method of replacing the common nouns in a familair verse with the 7th noun after it in a dictionary.

To be or not to be: that is the quickstep;
whether tis nobler in the minimum to suffer
the slip-ups and arsenic of outrageous foundling
or take armistice against a seam of trout
and by opposing, end them

Naturally i had to try it myself immediately. The first two poems showed how much trial and error of options it would take to get something gratifyingly strange and pleasing as that.