ST: At your recent talk titled “Urgency and Momentum” you introduced a new theoretical framework you’ve been exploring, that you called “request moments.” You spoke about how much of the time, most if not all of us are doing not what we want to do but what other people ask of us either directly or indirectly. Your point was to arrive at a type of necessity, that creates, as you put it, “forces in narrative that make characters do what they do.” Clearly, from your new collection’s title, the trope has caught your attention.
CB: There’s too much emphasis these days on the singular ego, the singular self, both in fiction and outside of it. I’d like to think that the request moment is only one of many dramatic forms that we can discover when we think about social interactions; in fact, there’s an infinite number of ways that we place requests, conditions, blessings, and wounds on each other. Each of them is dramatic.

Urgency and Momentum: An Interview with Charles Baxter, Susan Tacent, Tin House Inteviews Online, May 2015

Perhaps, we are always hurtling our body towards
the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love
from the speeding passage of time...

The Leash, Ada Limón

Do you remember
what tricks you used
to tell yourself

fragment from A JAGGED PATH, poem in progress

"Hello," she said to the ghosts in the cave, said to the cave, said to the heavily breathing presences in the cave, said to her shadow form.

And who does not wish to enter one of the places of her own dreams where she can greet the foretelling harmonic form of herself?

"I'm here," she said.

Kevin McIlvoy, At the Gate of All Wonder

I learned 
            >
            <
            =
early

I applied this
knowledge
to circles
for instance,
our earth

I was
a diligent
student

Today it’s trying so hard
to snow
there’s pressure from this holiday
sad little flakes
not jewish
not black
not nothing


A Jagged Path, (working title, poem in progress)