Pregrets

Note for poems: I get an odd kind of pleasure from writing longhand underneath pre-selected titles, titles that seem to imply or propose a tonal space from which to begin generating and/or arranging material. A small show of drawings, prints and paintings by Jasper Johns at the Museum of Modern Art titled Regrets made me curious to try that word as a title this past spring, and the term Pregrets – the fantasy or fact of getting ready to feel sorrow or distress, the attendant humors such a frame might provoke, the probability of not landing in the predetermined spot, the derangement of proposed memories – popped into place after awhile and eventually took over as the primary term to work under. As the process of writing these poems is on-going, I don’t have a further assessment to make of their makes, and don’t want to force one out just yet, out of fear of stopping the vehicle before it ends on its own terms. I can say that I’m relying heavily on what I consider internalized collagist wiring to make relatively quick decisions about what gets into the poems.

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