I had another thought about the poetry community thing and it’s far-fetched or simple-minded or right on, I’m not sure. It’s my suspicion that much of the time it’s not only the diminished hope of returns in ongoing timespace of human relating that feels like it’s in scarcity and that risk of missing the boat threatens connectivity but also the diminished hope of ongoing interpersonal timespace itself in the face of global economic insecurity, climate change, nuclear proliferation, diminishing h20 resources, increasing expectation of imminent terrorist deracination and infrastructural collapse — all the things I myself think of when I decide maybe I prefer not to live forever. (I can’t think of any other reason not to I’ve forever, but those can, on increasing realization of what we can for the moment call fears, add up not only to my personal suffering but my being one more uneasy burden on whoever is young and bright enough to negotiate the radically catastrophic and revamped future we may be up against to ever accelerating degrees). I know this is kind of a grim thought, and it doesn’t occur to me while I am dialoguing with you but later, in a subway car, after listening to people talk (for the most part, very compellingly and well and intelligently, even brilliantly) about the schizophrenogenic circumstances of life in Israel and Palestine (these being two names for the same thing, of course, at least in more than one way). I wonder if what I’ve just referred to, which is I believe more an intrinsic internalized cross-population un-ease than a litany or inventory of risk and worry, also underlies the rising tide of typographical errors in all writing, on line or published in print, across recent years. This morning, reading two Poetry Foundation website articles on Laura Elrick’s book Propagation, I find in each one patently inadvertent but unmarked typo, each time in a lengthy quotation from a review published (on line, presumably) elsewhere. Was the error (e.g., ‘and’ for ‘an’) not noticed in the original, then again not noticed in the essay quoting it? Who’s minding the store? Probably, as we were saying, the person so delegated, if they exist, is overworked, not sleeping enough, has digestive track (tract? why can’t I tell which word is right?) trouble, and is distracted by terror of a sort they can’t focus on, focusing instead on sort of doing the right thing, even if that’s a suspect project and in any case it can’t be done entirely right.
