... a place from which to wait ...

Today the inside of my head has felt like this.

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"That the word "poem" means "to make" is an overstated fact—poetry is, I think, most interesting (and most vital) when it dismantles. Not that a poem should concern itself with laying waste to what is made—though that might be of some help at certain times—but maybe poems can show us how to take objects, places, one another and ourselves apart. Might we agree that a clock’s innards can be more compelling than the time of day?

I like to think of poetry as kind of anxious patience. We wait for the poem to arrive; we wait for the poem to mean. But to wait is also, in some way, to set out. Waiting, we are pitched toward coming climates, bodies, times. A poem is a place from which to wait.

In order to "interpret" a poem, readers need space in it. Too much and they’re lost; not enough and there’s nothing for them to do. But unlike, say, a luxury hotel, an incredibly comfortable poem will insure that readers won’t return—there needs to be some sort of serration along which we can drag their minds and tongues. Otherwise, the poem is just a consumable object best eaten and forgotten. I suspect that there are endless ways to make the proper spaces in poems—blank space is only one of them."
(Graham Foust)

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Also worth checking out: Coolidge talking about bebop prosody at http://www.archive.org/details/Clark_Coolidge__Robert_Creeley_and_Steve_91P067