 So I'm going to read from the introduction to Dear Reader because it references this place, this space. So introduction begins with a quote from Diderot, from Jack the Fatalist, and his master from 1796. But who shall be the master, the writer, or the reader? My friend Simone notes there are so many quotes, a sign of anxiety, the talkers and listeners in the rooms or out on the highway. The fatalist and his master narrate, desire, philosophize, serve, relate, exchange. Out of master, one might pull a mast, rig a ship, invent a star to navigate by. The writing in this book was composed over a number of years, the three distinct series or projects after Oppen and Howe, the Melmouth letters, and making marks begin in reading. Other lands from the Making Marks series began with a book serendipitously found on the shelves at the San Francisco Public Library. It was a history of the bottom, asses, buttocks, fests, and fism. I took notes from the book but not a citation. And for some reason, I didn't check it out. When I went back to find it on the shelves, it wasn't there. The catalog contained no trace of it. The missing book was a deaccessioned, taken out of commission, hallucinated. Google searches turn up history from the bottom up, but no history of the bottom. History from the bottom up provides a useful starting point, however. Jacques is a servant of Valet, after all. He's good at unpacking a peripatetic, self-conscious labyrinth that runs continually astray. At the same time, history is gendered and sexed. The nomadic eye, restless, restive, sometimes resistant, even extant, recycles, returns. Every day, experience, gendered, though not only, marked by class, though not only, of words meaning more than what they say. Thus, words erupt out of, as if under pressure to be writ large, speak more, they struggle against auto-correct. Sometimes for the pleasure of the local, the nary in the binary, and other times for commentary, as in premogenitor, the rot in such a system. Part of what's being talked about here is that some of these poems have capital letters that erupt in the midst of them and across words to make other words. And you'll hear some of that a little bit later, but it's hard to see. You can't see it, and you can't hear it really in this introduction. There is pleasurable revision, a scance. The majest school underscores as it works to unseat gendered subjectivity from the bottom up. The object, her, wrestles the presumed subject. He, in a playful revision of a children's song. The subject takes a wife, repeat. Or sometimes, a stutter. Organs interrupted by happiness, bitter, bijou in the dark, bitters, it, it, it. And after Oppen and Howe, I wanted to supply, I wanted to apply Susan Howe's history lesson to talk back to George Oppen, whose writing seduces, leaving no marks on the skin. I wanted to mark it up while acknowledging the pleasure of its porosity, the sonorous holes gaping, a gap in which feeling enters. I want to call down and out history's absent feeling. Feeling and counterclaim enter the gaps. To gap agape. Reading and writing offer a model of transgression of the individual subject and all its architecture, gender, class, sex, race, the subject, ideologies, morphine. The subject provides the tools for the struggle to come, a wall to chip away at with a spoon or unfolded paperclip. We seek a tunnel to the outside from at least this side, guided by the stars of a failed belief in poetry. Nonetheless, an intervention, intercession, a record on the cave wall of the present. It's all so hard, these reading glasses, I can't see you without looking over the top of my glasses. It's very weird. But I also can't read without them. Prelude, after Oppen and Howe. Read, counter, dear, history's white shroud, poems, daybooks, letter absence, hear, past a spell, call fishes from white sea, space, to tell, to turn, poems. What has been told inside darkness out, how open when we three toil, trouble, give a sound, now woe, now hope, how bare we pen. After Oppen and Howe, this has two quotes. The first one is from Paul Smith and the second from George Oppen. Smith, the essence of the country is bound up in Indian land and African slave labor. And Oppen, one must not come to feel that he has a thousand threads in his hands. He must somehow see the one thing, even if we have not chosen meaning of being shipwrecked, wielded, obsessed women. She, who will not write, seeps, troubles, the rest isn't his beloved, discovered, the she unsheaths her pen. Some say, John Cabot, Giovanni Cabotto, Cabotto, Chabotto, Bagotto, Cabotto, Savotto, et cetera. A Genoese sailing for England met Mic Max, Mic Max, some say, Le Maître pilote Jacques Cartierre, Nova Scotia, 1497 or 1534, where Earth, later, is shorn of wounds, upended, womb of the moving column, chief's daughter, Emmeline, splint Ashwood, birch bark, split cedar, history disappearing into white race, her braids cheekbone turn up, fish darken sister's skin, passes from generation to generation, the way rape marks a system and her, difficult not to speak. My sister, my sister, what can I say and say? The body is easily opened. He won't do it to you, white. He did it. He couldn't wail, line a shield, time on one side, body other. Our vocabulary did this. Encounter in and against and with bright light, transatlantic passage. On July 8, 1534, the women, witnesses, came freely to the French, freely, rubbing their arms a friendly gesture, selling the furs they wore, friendly and retiring naked. Furs, phantom ship, hands were lost, shipwrecked sea, from time, from open time, to have been carried away or in underbrush. Waste of the ship between forecastle and sterncastle seized, Latine mizzen sail, strumpet wind, skirt stony shore, line and cliff in harbor slip. World, world, failure, worse failure, nothing, not to sit at desk, caribou, moose, or to sea, to harpoon. Though they are a present populace, first to lose one's want, one's history, semi-nomadic, porcupine quillwork, overworked world. An infinite burden today, one cannot count desperate as we are, pressed, our skins feel not pierced, traded. Women, counter and spare, our too muchness, wielders a forest, burning, split, a negative ordinary. Lorine in the cupboard, head and closet, natural history, awaits, burr and dear against a heart uselessly small. The nomadic eye, restless, restive, sometimes resistant, even extant, recycles, returns eye on the Barbary Coast, fog meets cornea, eye hailing, Cabot from Scotian shores, women ever so friendly, their arms waving, waving. Buried in eponymous village in Brittany, eye in poet or mother, mother, rough, clam, beard, a long way from home, eye on the assembly line, paper pulp, telephone wire, Lawrence mass, capital of workers, eye with a few extra stitches, nudge, nudge. Mirrors, fulgent glare, trains, resistant, multifonic, buzz, burr on the radio, forward and back, rolls up, slate sea, dark night, tailings, flare.