17 seconds

2019

A visitor spends no more than seventeen seconds looking at a painting. Seventeen seconds on average. That’s what Joan E. Goodman, the guide at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, told us. They’ve apparently done the research. That’s the leisure we can offer a painting in our crazy times.dos”.

When you start to think about it, the rhythm of poetry is totally different. Poetry stops time, poetry is looking, poetry is paying attention to everything that will disappear. Anne Carson said once, “[I have] an attitude that however bad life is, the important thing is to make something interesting out of it. And that has a lot to do with the physical world, with looking at stuff, snow and light and the smell of your screen door and whatever constitutes your phenomenal existence from moment to moment.” Looking at your surroundings, thinking how all that stuff was right there just before, and there it will be, maybe, later on.

This book gathers poems written over seventeen years, from 2002 to 2019. Seventeen years as long as seventeen seconds.