My objects of affection

‘My objects of affection’ is the closing essay in a book called The Stranger I Become: On Walking, Looking, and Writing (forthcoming May 25, 2021, Turtle Point Press). This essay blends personal experience, encounters with ‘others’ (in this case not only people but also objects), observations about perception, and both technical and personalised readings of poems that live inside and influence me. In doing so, it serves the goal of gaining both scholarly and personal insight into how, through the deployment of objects, poems come into the world, operate, and inhabit the life of a reader. Together, the essays consider how a mind submerged in poetry and alive in a world of objects, and the slippery language in which objects are invoked, synthesises varieties of experience, including scholarly experience, into producing poetry and thinking deeply about how it works. In particular, the essay examines the ways in which objects, which exist independently in the world but also as sites of meaning and connection in our relationships with the world, can therefore be deployed in poetry both as touchstones and as sites of instability. What most sets this work apart from ‘braided’ texts is its attempt to eradicate distinctions among elements other essays treat separately, including the objects it references via images, nouns, and pronouns, placing materials together in a conversation that blurs rather than establishes hierarchies and distinctions. Under the category of ‘objects,’ I include the human body and its constituent parts, so confusing distinctions between body and person and among persons, including writer and reader. Thus, the research and artistic claims are identical: that, in an integrated life, assigning personal and poetic meaning to objects, being among others, considering death, and composing or encountering a poem in a way that leads to deep understanding, don’t have to be separate endeavours. In this, the essay participates in my larger project of showing through enacting, how poems, operating as poems, illuminate and are illuminated by an individual life.