Notes for The Hole

Over the past two and a half years I have been composing a manuscript called The Hole (formerly titled "Nonsite Poems"). Now I am trying to write an essay about it, particularly the mode(s) of subjectivity it may be embodying. Here are some notes so far:

"Words like moving dirt to where we/it was not before could be called “development” if it is for profit or a process by which “I” is discovered in relation to we, a relationship by which I and we coappear complicitous with one another.

In moving dirt—like moving word-like bodies or bodies like words because we feel something for them—the whole landscape changes, all the points in space shift as if one could ever draw an accurate map of the multitude—always occurring.

I have wanted the feeling for that moment—when an entire terrain both somatic and psychic and social—seems to slide beneath a reader's feet, no constellation, no conveying but where here is.

This manuscript would present movement —the moving of lines in a lineated, enjambed poem for instance—as a means of discovering what remains of “I” subtracted from social relations, public identities, participation in a community—the nearly total mediation of the subject in contemporary experience. After these processes follows a formal feeling that I is substantiated by loss—the loss implied by all holes but also by movements which will not develop."