I’ve long felt the need for a publication to appreciate the poem in context (isn’t it about time we admit poems are not worlds unto themselves and need not, or should not, “stand alone?”), so I was thrilled when Brad Vogler of Delete Press asked me to submit to his new publication Opon. Vogler is looking for “something more involved than just a poem or two” (as he sold it to me in our email correspondence), and encourages submitting process statements, revisions, video, sound, image… and I have to say the results in this first issue are truly exceptional.

Here is a space to tell the stories of process and product; Vogler presents the work as living things. The other poets/artists included in the issue are Jill Magi (with images and process notes from a new bookish project of procedural notes that will be kept in clay boxes), Kate Eichhorn (with poems documenting the process of cataloguing videos from the Feminist Video Vault) Eric Goddard-Scovel (whose process is computerized though exposes reading intimacy with Gertrude Stein), Tirzah Goldenberg (whose poems are “gathered and gleaned” from Dead Sea Scrolls), and Nico Vassilakis (whose visual poems nod to composer Conlon Nancarrow). I’m so grateful for my work to appear with such incredible company. I feel as though I’ve intruded upon these works in the most delightful way. Please do, also, intrude.