More than once, I’ve considered discontinuing the Instagram feed for this project.

The problem isn’t the photos, but these things:

The screen capture poems.

There is something off-key with the screen captures—something groping about them, something juvenile.

But then again, there is something groping and juvenile about this whole project, which adds to its perverse appeal. Too much is avoided when one fears being deemed a lightweight. And so I press on—even with the Instagram feed.

And still, something happens when one converts this:

A window behind you.
  Put Virginie out there.
  Teal Vespa, marron hair.
Scarf horizontal,
  A skirted lovely prude
  Speeding out of view.

To this:

Some reduction occurs. The image changes the words, somehow cheapens them.

It may be the company that screen captures keep. This kind of cheerleading bollocks:

Or angsty scribbles:

Maybe.

Maybe it’s the lingering privilege we still give to books, which, at least inne ye olde dayes, were made by printing words on pages, not through the impregnation of a screen. Screen captures are doubly cheap: images of images.

But I don’t think it’s any of these.

I think it must be that taking photos of poems and posting them on the Internet is the final capitulation to the screen. A surrender to the mediocrity of the medium.

You look at these things and wonder whether it’s the end of the road for the poem, the poet or poetry—take your pick—and quickly thereafter follows the discomfort that comes from not knowing what to do with such morbid understanding.

But here_

Out here on the Interwebs you find the fret and the subduction of hope and malice, the tectonics of emotion. This is the place were the plates grind together uncomfortably. The process, the project, and the product may never be completely satisfying.