I enter this year, 2025, limply, minus gusto— which is not to say that I enter it without gratitude. Perhaps something has shifted in the way I understand the operative medium, this context called ‘language’ which has always been so closely tied to music in my mind. Let me begin in that digression, winding back to the year 1872, when Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music shattered the conventional understanding of music that had emerged with the rise of literacy. “Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts,” he wrote, after staring at his typewriter and feeling that this use of this tool actively altered his words, placed his words in another medium, which mediated them.

Mediums radiate. And Nietzsche’s eyes were beginning to fail; the typewriter enabled him to contrive writing after he could no longer see his own words on paper. He could still see the typewriter keys a little, but he had memorized them, and it was this muscle memory that permitted him to feel where the letters waited to be touched by his fingers. This use of the typewriter coincided with Nietzsche’s perception that Wagner’s operas had changed “the medium of the music,” thus irrevocably altering  what humans expected of music and how they perceived it. 

In 1845, about forty years prior to Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, the OED expanded the definition of “mediation” in English to include “that part of plainsong that lies between two reciting notes.”

Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, like the Jonas-mask of theatre, had two faces. The first version was an effusive celebration of Wagner–or so Nietzsche said–although it was later re-issued as anti-Wagner polemic. The words and text weren't altered significantly. Instead, Nietzsche indicated in the preface a new way of reading the dynamics, a different way of playing the same notes with a different notation. From effusive to furioso. Now the tone would be played vehemently, furioso, and the reader was indicated that this would be the performance in the introduction.

Introduction

But I cannot play it vehemently, this gratitude mingling with the perpetual disquiet that visits when it comes to speaking about what I have written. Unlike Nietzsche, my mask is not Janus-faced but closer to the frozen scream of the Gorgon whose face disappears into the faces it sees. And there are so many faces in those screams. So many faces and fevers, gathered, gathering, like music to my mind. For that is the other side of words, the sole of the shoes I trod, the part that makes contact with the ground—- has always been music, music, sound. Thus do I introduce a small snippet of various conversations that this year, and place these conversations in relation to my favorite language, folding gratitude into the ruinscapes of another calendar while holding the faces of my interlocutors, fondly. Fondly. The pleasure of that is mine.

1

I’ll begin with “The Fallacy of Literary Citizenship”: A conversation with Karan Kapoor” for the Only Poems newsletter, because Karan invited me to consider questions that feel critical to existence and language right now, and so I excerpt part of an answer to a question that he posed, with gratitude to him for the brief moments in which life allows us to behold one another outside, however dimly:

“In the U.S., a fetus has a “right to life” without a corresponding “right” to healthcare. From the minute an American fetus is born, or gains an existence apart from its parent's body, it  has fewer rights than it did in the womb. What Lauren Berlant called “the contradiction between the sovereignty of abstract citizens and the everyday lives of embodied subjects” is structured by these financial and physical inequalities that normalized, and made to seem natural to the human condition. Legally, citizenship administrates class hierarchies and legitimizes them as collective goods. For example, a corporation ‘needs’ a tax break in order to provide ‘jobs’ so that the economy won't ‘fail;’ or, the defense industry ‘needs’ a new war in order to keep that lottery known as ‘retirement accounts’ functioning. Neoliberalism ensures that certain individuals or groups will be excluded from the literary community for the reasons you mention. The economic aspects of ‘literary citizenship’ can't be separated from the social and cultural ones.”

(And, because I know how much Karan shares my love for Leonard Cohen, it is of course a Cohen song that wafts through the room of a conversation about belonging, and not-belonging, and failing to imagine one another in a way that opens the world.)

And what can I tell you my brother, my killer
What can I possibly say?

— Leonard Cohen, “Famous Blue Raincoat”

2

“The self on reel reminds me that embodiment's relation to the nowness of things isn't a whole picture. We're not seeing each other completely. We aren't permitted to appear in our complicated fullness to one another.”

— Lynn Emmanuel in “The Privilege and Responsibility of Disagreeing for Eternity", published in Identity Theory

— Ólafur Arnalds & Nils Frahm, “20:17”

3

“I think periods and punctuation are most noticeably absent in the title series. That’s because those poems reckon with eternities—love and war and suffering and child-rearing and violence and planetary movements and climate crisis and history and mortality. These eternities have always been with us, and they always will be. They’ll never stop talking.”

— Molly Spencer, in A Conversation with Molly Spencer, published in The Adroit Journal

Speaking kind of cryptically
The sea that raged beside the tree
Burning bright for all to see
It just might mean the most to me

— The Cowboy Junkies, “Speaking Confidentially”

4

“You look at the membrane of what reading is and you zoom in on it and all these other world(ing)s spring up or are concomitantly created with your own noticing; you are always this station through which the noumena passes into signal. This would be true of even the crudest things—if you polish the mirror enough you can see just about anything in it. I’m sure there’s someone out there who has understood the entire universe by rewatching the same reality tv show over and over. The work I’m involved with aspires to open out the encounter in widening spirals . . . “

— Garett Strickland, “You are always this station through which the noumena passes into signal”: A conversation with Garett Strickland, published in Minor Literature[s]

And they had all arrived at the same buidling at more or less the same time.
And they were all free.
And they were all asking themselves the same question:
What is behind that curtain?

— Spiritualized, “Born Never Asked”

5

“I kept thinking about Jabès’s notion that each of us lives with an unsayable word that can’t be shared, only sacrificed. What happens to that unsayable word in the mind of a person who is dying? Might it shape a person’s last thoughts, their vision of an afterlife, what sacrifice of themselves might outlast them? I see that closing poem as a subtle response to the epigraphs from Levinas and Jabès that open the book, inviting readers to think about the absences that shape our perceptions when we step out the door, whether it’s in a place we can go barefoot, or have to wear shoes and get in an elevator.”

— Idra Novey, “Our Good Ghosts: A Conversation with Idra Novey”, published in Orion

From the pain come the dream
From the dream come the vision

— Peter Gabriel, “Fourteen Black Paintings”

6

“Repetition often has an incantatory effect. Nursery rhymes use repetition, rhythm, and rhyme to grant the wish laid upon the first star. Despite this magical aura of naming and claiming, wishing evokes passivity. Wishes are childhood’s epistemological firmament, they are part of the structures of intimacy available to children in a world controlled and administered by adults.”

— “What Sparks Poetry: Alina Stefanescu on Uljana Wolf’s my cadastre”, published in Poetry Daily

Well it's about time

— Depeche Mode, “Useless” from the Kruder & Dorfmeister Session

7

“The nylon scent of the sleeping bag in which they make love, the languorous card games interrupted by strolls in the forest, the eros of reading aloud to each other— ‘it was the tenderest time of their lives together.’ György photographs Paul as they sprawl naked, feasting on canned beans. With the colors of the campfire playing across his face, Paul reads a poem to György—a poem that George describes to the narrator as ‘the most beautiful poem he’d ever heard,’ a poem that resembles love in the ‘mutual recklessness’ of creating a common world.”

— “Utopia Is Not a State; It Is a Compass: On Patrick Nathan’s ‘The Future Was Color’”, as published in Los Angeles Review of Books

Did I dream you were a tourist
In the Arizona sun?
I can see you there with lunar moths
And watermelon gum

— REM, “You”

8

“Memory fondles the sensual excess of first love and seeks to articulate the world that exists between two people whose language stays secret, even as they speak it. The writer fashions an icon of that first lover, immortalizing him with talismans and symbolic offerings, seeking his eternal approval, pouring a monument onto the page that preserves his magic for others.”

— The Telling Makes It True: On Robert Glück’s About Ed, as published in Cleveland Review of Books

You swim in moon, you left too soon

— Tricky, “We Don’t Die”

9

“Apocalyptic violence trolls the stage of the aubade, but the interim is lined with emptied outfits: ‘this arrangement born of desire and accident,’ sculptures ‘doomed to disappear’ unless preserved by a photo. A. knows her ploy will fail; it is ‘impossible to represent […] the unreality of sex in the reality of what it leaves behind.’ The problem of representation plagues both photo and text. No one can prove Jesus’s material resurrection from the presence of an empty shroud. Still, they testify.”

— “Every Abyss Is a Matter of Time" published in Los Angeles Review of Books (with a note to how much I owe Ellie Eberlee for thinking through this piece with me)

The night has come and left me
Just the light that you allow
Come speak my name
Fill my head with all such foolish dreams
My flesh and blood is no more real to me
Than what it seems

— Joe Henry, “Flesh and Blood” as covered by Solomon Burke

10

And one for the conversations I had on paper that have not been published, some of which mean the world to me. If worlds could matter. If words could carry my gratitude to the friendships that met me in those moments when language abandoned me. If worlds and words could recognize themselves in the loneliness of finishing the book.