Dan Waber
Sweet of Six

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I'm for increasing meaning, and find myself floundering in poetic circumstances where the goal is to make less meaning, or, worse, where I, as reader, am expected to do more of the work than the author. I don't mind sharing in the meaning-making enterprise, but, like any transaction, I don't like being the one doing the most work for the least reward.

These pieces are also about time, and how meanings shift over time. Sometimes memory is the culprit, the dissolving agent. Sometimes it's the flow of language itself that changes the sum total meaning of the contextual connections. Sometimes it's the variable pause of inflection.

These pieces are also about making a way out of my frustration as a poet with having to pick one word to go in one place and remain fixed there forever. Life just isn't like that for me, and after many years of banging my head against that fact of old style writing, I decided to quit complaining and do something about it.

Lastly, these pieces are about the identification of some of the underlying mechanisms of grammar and how meaning is made out of contextual relationships in sometimes very patterned ways, but that this patterning doesn't necessarily mean that we surrender to a pre-destination devoid of creativity. It only takes a tiny bit of combinatorial complexity to generate a dataset of tinder rich enough for the individual connotation sets we each carry with us to successfully achieve spark.