Some but not all poems and some but not all jokes share a formal progression: there’s the set-up, and the turn, and then the punchline.
In some ways, the joke is a kind of poem. The poem can act like a joke, but often it is looking for something other than or in addition to laughter.
Then there is a kind of thinking I do: things were like this, something happened, and then they went like this. I had an opinion, then I had an experience, and now I have another opinion. And so forth.
I think that thinking maps congenially to that formal progression; together they make a little engine without parts that turns a whole lot of not much into a little something, something.
Pictures of poems, as opposed somehow to the fungible, transmittable text of the matter, something like that; and showing those pictures alongside everybody else’s; selfies in other words. A constraint in the system was a limit I had to deal with, I thought, in error it turned out. I would not be the first to turn a misreading into a prosody, or even a poetics. Poems for the feed, shaped to fit.
And real pictures, in addition to the imitation ones on Instagram, as small vinyl stickers easily ordered online, another instance of contemporary business printing as a medium for custom poetry. Another machine without parts, switching from analog to digital to analog, a spindling iterative two-stroke cycle.
In all this doing and thinking, I take it for granted that the something, something should or would inevitably compound into a more substantial presentation. The ephemera condense and the poems accrete and accrue a third dimension; not of depth so much as thickness, some weight as they are handled by the eyes of the reader, appearing and disappearing in tandem as the pages of the book are turned over, like days, life-like in that way.
