Yesterday afternoon, after spending the morning going back and forth between two editing projects, I drafted three more Accident Sonnets. I really don't know what I think about these poems, but they are occupying me. I am taking them seriously. I feel as if they are work.

Today: more of the same, I guess . . . at least more of the editing, and I'm hoping for poems as well. But who knows what news the day will bring? We are at the mercy of history. 

Earlier this week I was writing to a friend who is drafting a poem about the putsch, encouraging him to experiment, in his next drafts, with language that enacts the violence that he is trying to capture. And since then I've found myself returning, in my mind, to this disturbing and difficult aspect of the art: in order to create outrage in the reader, to capture the outrage of a situation, we must, with our words, evoke and participate in that outrage. This same friend remarked, too, about the shame he endures at being the kind of person who feels the need to look so intently at the violence of events. Shame is a heavy load to carry.

For whatever reason, I am fortunate enough not to feel shame about my need to document and replay and re-feel, via words. Maybe I am too obsessed by the task to pay attention to shame. When it comes to words, my first urge is to give them all the room they need. Nonetheless, I recognize the strange horribleness of that urge. I recognize my ruthlessness. I understand how, for some people, for many people, it might feel like a tumor or an infection.