The Spectator Makes a Poem

One way to stay sane, to stay true.

Mar 20, 2025

A graffiti’d, stickered, and wheatpasted doorway with partially visible and partially obscured images of a bicycle, a thumbs-up sign, a poster with the word truth, and other layers, with bright red spray-painted unreadable letters over the top.

Dear Friends,

I’ve been thinking about how we stay sane in the constant unfolding crisis and dizzying spectacle — what practices help us stay true to our own minds and hearts?

Here on Substack,

Laurie Stone

has been exploring how writers can be alive to the present situation and still write. She shared this idea recently: “[…]I will suggest to people they try to incorporate some moment--even a sentence--of the feeling state they are in WITHOUT writing a complaint, a tract that uses abstract language, or an argument that tries to persuade other people how to act. The idea is to find a voice to incorporate what we are living rather than avoiding it and compartmentalizing it.” (emph mine.)

A few weeks ago I wrote about French philosopher Jacques Rancière’s assertion that a spectator need not be passive, instead, the spectator can be a poet: “she composes her own poem with the elements of the poem before her.”

This is how I’ve been approaching social media posts and news stories as they appear to me daily. It’s a way of keeping my heart alive.

— Sal

The Spectator Makes a Poem

A Post on Civil War

We are not calm. We have taken the old paintings into our hearts. We have seen the leaping horses and thought about the terrible losses. It looks like a classroom which has been ravaged, where all the books were taken away, and only one saint remains, suspended by her hands. Everything that takes place has already happened in a painting.

A Post on Cowardice.

A confrontation has been postponed, and by postponing it has been avoided, and by avoiding it has been turned away from, and by turning away it is pretending not to know, and by pretending not to know it is lying. There will not be an apology. In other times and places, jaguars tended to devour their colonizers. They did this by climbing upon them and biting in at the neck.

A Post on Canadian Poetry

It turns out that the arms of the trees are soft and I never knew it. Steam plays through the branches and the bare twigs. We are dancing together to an old standard and your roots, your roots have moves. At night, there’s a kind of melancholy to the ordinary street, which means a romance. I wonder what it is that you have done.

A Post on the Colors of the Day

A yellow flowering tree against a clear sky asks, did the ancients really not notice that the sky was a color? Or was it a color too obvious to name? Together tree and atmosphere make a flag if you think to read them that way. In the same way, we too are flags and fly the wind.

A Post on John Ashbery

The new past unfurls, he says, like a great somber hope. It’s the poets I repost most often, not because of anything true, but because of the way they insist on their own writing. I prefer a sky filled with birds, instead, I need saving every minute.

A Post on Death Valley

Someone has left their footprints along dune’s ridge. It seems likely those feet were living at the time. There is some distance in the view, and some sharply defined shadows. This is how it started, someone says. The poet Anne-Marie Albiach says, « and the body catches fire », which is undeniably true. In another place she says, « I am writing through your words ».

A Post on a Fen

Melville says it is not down on any map; true places never are. There is a photograph of a fen, green under a sky half sun-half clouds, and in the foreground one frondy seed head gesturing. What place is it pointing to? A sea of hands is reaching upwards to touch the star. Tell me what it is you want.

A Post on Horses

In the 14th century, apparently, a horse could go to hell. Here’s how you do it: a wingéd devil yanks a small horse-shaped spirit from the gaping horse’s mouth and pulls it into a cloud. Even now, I lay my horse in the bed like a bride, draped in a sheet. I wring my hands. Meanwhile, everyone is talking about the end, and the way it looks and feels on the tongue.