SELECTED NOTES ON ‘MAKE’
While the preceding poetic territory relies on the insistent enigma of the writing process as a source of music, I offer these notes to readers interested in delving further into the minutiae of the text. Generally excluded are identifications of historical figures, place names, and other entities that might be located via obvious Internet keyword searches unless there is a detail to add not readily available to the public and which I deem of importance to understanding what is happening.
SPREAD 29 (CAN WE FREEZE…)
dirst
To decide to do a thing first though in the end it does not get done first.
Paint proclaim 1989
Ref. to the poster-sized wedding invitations Anne and I printed in our Brooklyn apartment on Union Street. We rolled blue and red and gold paint onto my linoleum cut design that yodeled: COME ONE! COME TWO! WITNESS THE WONDROUS! SEE WITH YOUR VERY OWN EYES THE INCREDIBLE & STUPENDOUS UNION OF…
SPREAD 32 (SALIVATING CLAWS OF…)
the blindness that that binds
Ref. to sightless creators of intricate visible worlds of words such as jazz singer Diane Schuur (1953-) and writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986).
that does not burn while all else burns
A work of art centuries fail to erase. For instance: Brera Madonna painted by Piero della Francesca (1415/20-1492).
got my emt
Ref. to Major Dickason’s Blend, coffee sold by Peets in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Each enter never
The necessity to make things you think you cannot make.
ndar way of seeing
The radar that does not scour a vast expanse but infinitesimal territory.
Ben Miller is the author of the forthcoming Pandemonium Logs: Sioux Falls, South Dakota 2020-2022 (Rutgers University Press) and River Bend Chronicle: The Junkification of a Boyhood Idyll Amid the Curious Glory of Urban Iowa (Lookout Books, an imprint of University of North Carolina Press). His work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Experimental Writing, Kenyon Review, Raritan, One Story, New England Review, Yale Review, AGNI, Southern Review, Fiction International, The Georgia Review, and other venues. His awards include creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, as well as grants from the South Dakota Arts Council and the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.