“…. Let praise distinguish us, // place us here but coming from there; / let praise now us, bring us into this season.” — from “To Season” in Known by Salt by Tina Mozelle Braziel
…let praise now us… — is a nod to James Agee and his interlopering interlocution which I don’t know what interlocution means but I hope it means something that plays. With this idea, I mean. I know what I will write about tomorrow, what how-to I will do .. It will be “How to Read a Poem” and it will really be about hiking and the natural world, landscape, the texture of tectonics, how sound is a feeling and all of this comes from (orbiting) Tina’s book. The ways it is inspired (in-spirited) by the thicket of this place. How waking on a spiny ridge and pausing in a clearing to read a few poems from her book felt not like an intrusion or something interlop(er)ing at all — not some distinction between “poetry” (words or thinking) and Nature (or exertion, existing). But poetry and poetry. Poetry, capital P. Times two.