The Texts of Your Life

(Attempting to do a better job noting the books I read and what I pull out of them.)

In Tangier I absent
myself from the conference
to watch the ferries
and the shoreline
soccer. Am I not
enough with this world
that I want to write
it, too?

This is not the best of the sixty poems in the book, each assigned its own page, but it is one that captures me mostly for personal reasons. First, I used to live in Tangier, so I know that shoreline, that port, the parents and grandparents of those children playing soccer. The poem resonates for me simply as a reflection of my life. And that's a value. Poetry, even arcane and foreign poetry, captures us by connecting, somehow, to our lives, though not necessarily in such personal ways. But the second sentence of the poem is what makes it valuable to me. As a writer, as a poet, I am trying to be of the world through the process of writing and create the world through that process. Sarah Riggs, in this poem, and in the entire book she has written, 60 Textos, is trying to do the same.

For these are books written in and of the world, during the regular process of living, poems written in the same way a breath is taken: naturally, normally, sitting down, standing, walking, while looking and hearing and being. These are all poems texted from Riggs' blue Nokia cellphone to her friend Omar Berrada's silver Samsung cellphone.

The poems are, thus, short and simple. Their effects are largely not about sound or shape, though their linebreaks are sometimes disconcerting (as in the last one above) and may have been the breaks made naturally on the screen of her cellphone. Their effects are effects of sense, of thinking in the world: lyric poems without any lyric development, sometimes ironic, sometimes wistful, sometimes didactic, always alive in the world, and always personal.

A natural voice thumbed through a keypad unto the world. A refutation of the idea that the technological is somehow not human. An autobiography of a conversation heard from only one direction, this book is a sequence of little joys, a remembrance of the vibrant imagination of a mind in the process of living.

_____

Riggs, Sarah. 60 Textos. Ugly Duckling Presse: Brooklyn, N.Y., 2010. US$12.

ecr. l'inf.