One Fine Day

What is the time of a poem? Or, rather, how many times does it have? We can go travelling in text, aware or not of its constituent parts and their deep, or not, anchorings. We can catch an image here, an echo there, snatches of conversation, drifting fragments from elsewhere. Assemblage, that interesting narrative of contiguities and spaces, is different from collage with its holdfast tendencies, and from the shatterings of bricolage. Putting scraps beside each other gives pleasure without too much hegemony. Yes, this is a narrative, but it moves by synaptic firings, assembling itself along the way.

For this collection I went back to a long, unpublished journalling of a family trip to Europe a decade ago and pulled out sections with which to tell or glance sidelong at the intervening years. The journalling sections move backwards in time as their complementary sections move forward, arriving at a final section that ties one to the other, and off the poem goes again beyond its last lines.

— Michele Leggott