How elastic is form?

This is a collaborative experiment in time. Consider ways to rearrange your time and space tendencies as a method (write yourself out of whatever existing parameters you fall into) and see what happens.

As a parent of two small children I invent time in order to work. Thus the one-minute sonnet. Thus the collaboration with the kids. And finally after many years of controlled circumstances, the allowing in of all voices, all time. Deep and scattered fragments of time. Loud and physical time. Someone else literally pulling you out of your chair. Writing in your sleep, or falling face first (exhaustion) into the keyboard while writing, as Maureen Owen so wonderfully describes in her essay in The Grand Permission.

I have collaborated with the daily news, with other poets, with the bumpiness of days passing in real time and with children’s voices, books, and sense of time. I have drawn from devotional practices the sense of the poem as an offering—it is beyond ownership—what may be given now. When time is unhinged anyone or any thing can speak: the dead, the imagined, the dictionary, the found. There is an openness I attempt to enter as an experiment, as a salute to, or recognition of time passing.

This is a wake up and discover another year disappearing tactic. It’s a surrender. Upheaval. It’s the tower card in tarot which means the ground beneath you literally shifts (and not slightly). It’s the painful slap on the back with a wooden block while you are doing the dishes. It’s the question whispered, “Mommy are you meditating?” and the little body, little voice climbs onto your lap as you sit and your old vision no longer exists. And your new role is more invisible for its commonness and more challenging and exquisite for its namesake than ever seemed possible.

This is not a lament, but rather a plea against the invisibility of the guardian.

A plea against invisibility or blindness to whatever circumstances you find yourself within. The circumstance may also become, inform, or suggest the poem and the practice.

All mental states, traps, games, and assemblages are welcome here. My sonnets are an approachable unruly gathering. What the poems have in common is that they practice permeability.

I think of the modern sonnet as an increment of time within a frame. Something that often physically fits into a little rectangle (but not in thought). Something you can utter in one long convulsive breath or hold in your palm. When my hand covers the page, it disappears. It’s a controlled measure of sound and space within which one can do anything.

This book is an invitation.