Instant Messages

INSTANT MESSAGES: A FORM FOR THE 21st CENTURY Instant Messages is a new kind of writing, a mash-up of straightforward and accessible poetry, koan-like brain teasers, the delicate observations of Haiku, the terseness of texts, surprise one-liners, daily mumbling, text-based art, and aphorisms of penetrating insight. All wrap together in a common theme: that things and experience are "messages," if only one will pay attention to feelings, sensations, thoughts, to what's happening in real time.  You get to inhabit another mind, through a voice that's authentic and incisive---by turns clever and witty, or deep and spiritual. The author inserts himself in you…soon you see the world in a different way. This is not work that attempts to find universals in personal experience, but instead pressurizes life that's common to all of us, in language that is perfectly precise, relentlessly focusing on the commonality until it becomes personal. Individuality is revealed as a quality of attention on the life that we all share. The "messages," which work together as a kind of concept album, and resonate with each other, appear on the page as comments that come the inner voice---and are intended for the inner ear. They address interior life. Everything is fair game, everything belongs here, from digital VCRs to tracks in the snow, to needles in the arm, to unidentifiable movements at the bottom of a lake, to the question of ghosts.  The perceptions and style of Instant Messages go "outside the lines" of writing traditions established in the 19th or 20th centuries. In its inclusiveness of culture high and low, and the license and quirky originality of its language, Instant Messages has achieved a new expression; a form for the 21st century.