Ren Powell, Poet | Playwright | Teaching Artist

Dear HXH.

Playing with form again. Perhaps not the most productive way for me to work these days, but an old habit. Handwriting on unlined paper. Numbers and scratches for iambs and spondees. Illegible corrections.

I pulled a book off the shelf. What made me think of you?

I keep throwing myself at the feet of strangers, circling around them again, they are both familiar and made strange when viewed from a new point in time. This is the way of things, isn’t it? There is a painful roundness to the world – I started something new going over old territory.

The world is too round for my determination. The time=distance cluttered with objects as real as anything I think I can hold in my hands.

The Too Sharp Corners of the Too Round World. 

I keep accidentally dredging up evidence of my own life. Evidence is a funny word, really, in use. After all, evidence is just support for an argument. For a hypothesis.

The introduction to your poems presents the evidence that you likely existed.

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Believe in god’s perfection: a circular affectation, a gold-leafed halo, a ring.
But the world in rotation slips — an oblique perspective of life, a provocation.
The distance fills with substance. All truth is observation.