Remote Disjunctions
Mónica de la Torre
I didn't mind ferns enough, I thought, the last time I hiked up
to Lookout Point. They're so unassuming. I'd be looking
at the tops of third-generation redwoods, or beyond, toward
Googleplex, in Mountain View, which later Google confirmed
was the complex off in the distance. And I'd be picturing,
those last days, rhizomes and spores. Sorry to make you feel judged,
I almost texted. Stopped myself. Truth is I judge, and if judges
were prone to feeling sorry, they wouldn't. I welcomed noise
instead of trying to block it out with the folk musician's songs,
Scottish, coming from my laptop. If you don't remember a name,
does it mean you don't care to remember. You'd taken yourself
to places whose specifics you'd chosen to forget. You said you
weren't there to keep track, but to experience. Which, when
I'm feeling negative, I translate as ditching the thing as soon as
you're done with it onto the heap of junk you're not accumulating.
Those who get the backend know what detailed tagging can lead to:
a map so precise it's the territory's size. We're drifting apart
again, spore-like. I'm done completing your sentences.
A version of the signs along the trail anticipating the hikers'
ups and downs. "It begins with feeling," was the first, spotted
at the same time I noticed the pet waste bags someone had left
behind. "Here you leave your worries," seen after I passed a guy
whose grin was such, he did seem to have just dumped them.
This one got me thinking about our tendency to ruin things:
"This is a beautiful moment." The last wasn't part of the art:
"Please keep out of area under renovation." That resonated.
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Color photograph of an informal Ada Limon in front of a bookcase
Ada Limón at Sitka Center for Art + Ecology

“We hear a deep resonance between Limón’s poetry and Sitka’s mission. Art and nature are both ways of paying deep attention. Students in rural areas deserve the same opportunities to meet living artists, experience the best of human creativity and to hear their own stories reflected in that. I hope that people who attend leave the event knowing their words matter, their imaginations matter and that their voices belong in the world. Meeting a poet like Ada Limón makes that real.”

viaOREGON ARTSWATCH
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cover for The Compass Bird by Siddhartha Menon
What Sparks Poetry:
Siddhartha Menon on Drafts


"'Captivity' is true to the surface facts that it describes. Through the encounter with an unheeding bird, it is about the dichotomy between a full experiencing of something and the urge to record it by means of a camera—or, for that matter, to pin it down in real time through words, through labels. Does the capturing of experience come in the way of experience? Does the holding of something in posterity, or the attempt to do so, interfere with experiencing it in the quick? These are not rhetorical questions."
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