Dear Friends,

Yesterday morning, walking in my usual place, I felt, and then fought, the urge to snap a photo on my phone. Cold morning, hands cracking in the chill, but the day was beginning to warm the dark denim on my legs. I was at the river’s edge, looking across its tawny surface up into the skeletal birch trees. The sun held the golden leaves in light relief as they fell to rest on the water. It’s a scene I recognized, fixed in my memory by the photographic act. How many times have I taken the same picture over again while walking this meadow? Why do I do it?  

It’s so easy to catch a thing with a phone, to outsource an experience to a photo for some unspecified future purpose. Instead of sitting still with a feeling or a thought in a particularly resonant place, I fidget. My autonomic response: hand to pocket to phone, swipe, then outstretched arms and touch. Check the shot. In this motion, direct experience is confounded with mediated experience. Remembering this later, I am caught between seeing a pleasant scene in a landscape and seeing myself take a picture of a pleasant scene in a landscape. 

Vision, most voracious of the senses (for those who are able to see), is indomitable. Our media ecosystem responds in kind with infinite scrolls of things rendered in a visual deluge. We are provoked to submit to the stream our own pearls – sunsets, selfies, “stories” of our daily lives. We might add words as an afterthought: titles, descriptions, emotional context, #hashtags. Compared to the immediate expressiveness of our pictures, language is fast and pragmatic, maybe recycled, and mostly subservient to the image. The poets, rappers, and authors lob rhymes, alliterations, and metaphors in gleeful rebellion at the gates of a decadent pictopolis: “You can’t win!”

I’m living in language again. Writing these letters has helped me rediscover a love of language. It’s a practice. My tentative attempts at writing poems is also a part of this practice. In poetry, the language medium (for me) is much more rudimentary. Words – how they sound in my head or, less often, spoken aloud – are materials that I can manipulate, experiment with, collect from others, try on, shape, play with. The meaning of the words might arrive later as I consider how best to communicate something with someone.

We should love language. How it sounds. How it looks on a page or a screen. How it bounces around the rooms we inhabit, resonates in our bodies and in our minds. Maybe you’ve forgotten about loving language, or never did. I had forgotten. But what have we got to lose? We can love language, privately or publicly, on our own terms. Reading the same sentence aloud a hundred times until it sounds like gibberish, or writing a list of words that rhyme because it’s fun. We can play with language, just mess around. I can cut and paste collage poems, find haikus in the backyard, or glance around this room I’m in now and pluck the words out of thin air.

Hoping you find some words to love today,

Jeremy