I’ve been wrestling for some time with the notion of a hard/clean/steel/spare poetics—a poetics that emphasizes clarity—and some more elaborate, bulky, flaccid poetics that this is contrasted to, as well as with the use of “masculine” and “feminine” to describe these.

Part of what I have wrestled with is the tension between the simplicity and clarity and power by which an image can be established and my satisfaction with this, and an ethic or posture of the hard and spare that simply and mechanically attempts the simple and spare in a crude flattening or attenuation—in other word the difference between a close practice and a rule or vector that becomes tyrannical and, like all rules, brings with itself a set of secondary performances required to make ritual witness of the preference.

I have nothing against close practice and am always looking for it, and I militate in different ways against any rule that’s become a fashion.

Surely the use of masculine and feminine to describe this difference is a sign that the conversation has shifted to fashion, for gender is precisely a very old rule that we perform and are ordered by. And so, a sorting out that returns us to the same old.

Over the last few months, I’ve been thinking about a different set of terms—still incomplete—by which something new could be said about the issues at stake in taking about clarity or elaborate and cluttered, and I am trying out the difference between what I call a lyric attention to light, and a lyric attention to shape-shifting.

A lyric attention to light is attentive to what light does, which is clarify and still, make real, reveal, shine, shine across the top of, glint off of and so on.

A lyric attention or impulse to shape shift I awareness of change/dynamic and unfooting that occurs and clear things change and become something else.