| "When I wrote this poem, I had been reading about different forms of dance notation and thinking about them in terms of poetics. Dance notations—as translations of movements into symbols and paths—are an incredibly strange, elaborate, and illegible (to me) language. Maybe in part because I am a translator, I’m fascinated by such attempts to create a 'shorthand' for things that one’s language can’t quite accommodate. Are poems a sort of notation? This poem tries to 'put into words' certain intuitions, fears, and impressions that elude the rational and experiential. There is a weird image of violin-playing, for example, which seems to stretch a bit beyond what is sensory or sensible. Years after writing this poem, I also read it very much as a meditation on, and in, the music of poems. The music of the words is a lot richer than the semantics in this space."
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