Katie Naughton
$5
It seems the idea comes in a different form every time it comes, each time a new process of letting the outside in and letting the inside out.
If you exist any day you are not the same as any other day no nor any minute of the day because you have inside you being existing. Anybody who is existing and anybody really anybody is existing anybody really is that.
But anything happening well the inside and the outside are not the inside and the outside inside.
Let me do that again. The inside and the outside, the outside which is outside and the inside which is inside are not when they are inside and outside are not inside in short they are not existing, that is inside, and when the outside is entirely outside that is it is not at all inside then it is not at all inside and so it is not existing. Do you not see what a newspaper is and perhaps history. (116-17)
¾Gertrude Stein’s “Narration” via Philip Whalen via Leslie Scalapino’s “How Phenomena Appear to Unfold”
If I exist today I am alone in an apartment I used to live in, waiting to be ready to unfold something. It’s the dark end of the year, a time in which I am almost invariably spending inside straining to stay in thought, trying to continue to feel like I exist (anybody really anybody is existing anybody really is that) while the longest night comes, while the rituals of money and bright fabrics, sugar, cocktails, and light unfold around me and I am trying to go into the darkness alone and come out again. (An encounter with darkness an encounter with light.) Let me do that again. I am trying to put what someone has written inside of me and outside again with something added to it. I am trying to put something inside of me outside of me. But anything happening well the inside and the outside are not the inside and the outside inside.
published in Ottawa by above/ground press
August 2021
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy
Katie Naughton is a poet living in Buffalo, NY, where she is a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program at SUNY - Buffalo. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Colorado State University. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Jubilat, Michigan Quarterly Review, Bennington Review, and elsewhere. She is at work on two collections of poems, “Hour Song,” which was a finalist for the 2021 Nightboat Poetry Prize under the title “the real ethereal,” and “Debt Ritual.” She is the publicity editor for Essay Press and founder of Etcetera, a web journal of poetry and poets' reflections on reading.
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