The Persons

In 2010 the Canadian poet Peter Jaeger celebrated his fiftieth birthday. The Persons is a scrapbook of found texts that have been clipped, archived, and sorted for their parallel grammatical structure, with the proper name and verb always preceding their complimentary parts. Those fragments are then rearranged so that no two consecutive sentences come from the same source. Jaeger's life, here, is thus written through the words of others: those protagonists who animated his imagination and left their traces in the newspapers, emails, diaries, books (from literature to philosophy), and all the countless ephemera with which the externalized inner drama of our lives plays out.