Here is a passage from Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Unpacking my Library.” that I like:

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?

Thinking of the circumstances of Benjamin’s death in flight, his writing about the packing and unpacking of his library seems horribly poignant, but also makes me think about the present state of memory. Post-pandemic especially, we’re used to being unsettled in almost every sense of the word, and distrust our ability to remember clearly and, especially, chronologically. Is his acknowledgement of a house made of chaos especially relevant now?

These poems accommodate chaos in memory. They are the product of a practice of reading back into things that were read, overheard, watched, walked alongside, and otherwise absorbed… As in a song, a painting, a scrap of conversation long since detached from its context and carried for days, months or years before being found a second time, aligned and offered to the flow of the poem’s becoming.

Poems: “Sheer curtains of the forest”; “Space between eclipses”