The Retract App
“Its arrival, all agree, was way past due/after the myriads of dramas/traumas—/the faux pas amidst the memoranda.”—By Claire Bateman
Speculative Friction
By Claire Bateman
GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—8/11/2014—
The Retract App
“First thought, best thought.” —Allen Ginsberg, Spontaneous Mind
Its arrival, all agree, was way past due
after the myriads of dramas/traumas—
the faux pas amidst the memoranda.
Now there’s an eleven-minute gap
during which a sender can take back
that dubious message, fluently retrieved
even after it has been received.
(Incidentals in the sendee’s brain
flow swiftly in to fill the micro-chasms.)
Who doesn’t need this kind of intervention
from time to time, despite the mental spasms,
the vertigo and lapses of attention?
Now everyone posts without misapprehension.
Now everyone waits 660 seconds
before composing an acknowledgement
of what might soon become unseen, unsent.
To order copies of Claire Bateman’s books Scape or Coronolgy from Amazon, click on the book covers below.
Claire Bateman
Claire Bateman’s books include Scape (New Issues Poetry & Prose); Locals (Serving House Books), The Bicycle Slow Race (Wesleyan University Press), Friction (Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize), At The Funeral Of The Ether (Ninety-Six Press, Furman University), Clumsy (New Issues Poetry & Prose), Leap (New Issues), and Coronology (Etruscan Press). She has been awarded Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and the Surdna Foundation, as well as two Pushcart Prizes and the New Millennium Writings 40th Anniversary Poetry Prize. She has taught at Clemson University, the Greenville Fine Arts Center, and various workshops and conferences such as Bread Loaf and Mount Holyoke. She lives in Greenville, South Carolina. (Please see Bateman’s amazon.com Author’s Page for links to all her publications, and go here for further information about the poet and her work.) (Author Head Shot Augment: René Laanen.)