There is Victory in Waiting

Gary Bary, "asemic mouth 2" from the poem "The Desk" (2011)
Every day, as I write another poem, I think to myself that we write poems not for the sense of it, but for its unsense, for what it leaves unsaid and thus leaves us yearning for something, leaning into the poem, to see it more clearly, to hear it more fearlessly, to make some right sense out of it, though that point never comes, and we are left with a stream of words we almost understand but cannot hold still long enough to completely define.

A poem is of words in flight, and sometimes the flight is away.

Every night, I write a poem to someone I know, and I do this for 99 more nights of my life in a row, so that I will have a year's worth of poems written out, in the guise of letters, to people who usually don't expect them. Most of these poems go to people who are not poets and, more importantly, to people who do not ever read poetry. So they know not what to do with the words, which is one reason about half of them don't respond to the poem in any way, which is perfectly fine with me. They are, I assume, confused by a letter from someone who doesn't write to them, they are confused by the poem, and they question my motives. But my motives are only to write as if I'm writing to someone by actually writing to someone, so each of these poems is constructed with the idea that it will go to a particular person.

And one of the facts that makes these poems confusing is that they are poems. They are articles of writing that do not bother with the niceties of argument, that play games by hiding themselves, and that are opaque, at times, concerning their connection to the recipient. So it was with the poem I sent to Gary Barwin, which engendered this response from him:

I so appreciate both your actual letter and your poem letter. The poem has an indirect puzzling loveliness to it.

Gary was puzzled as if a non-reader of poetry, because poetry is puzzling, even Gary's is, and his poetry always has a clarity, sometimes even a catchy narrative clarity, to it. But when I discovered Gary had written me a poem entitled "The Desk" that was  created partly out of asemic writing and partly out of English words, I wondered what the connection was to me.

Certainly, the asemic writing resembled my work in this field of "poetic" endeavor, but what about the rest? Was the poem focused on a desk because he imagines me writing at a desk? (even though I usually write on a couch, and sometimes at a table). I don't know, but I appreciate and like the poem and the gift.

For every poem is a gift.

ecr. l'inf.