I was driving and happened to catch the end of an NPR interview with author, Nick Laird of Glover's Mistake.

"...And I try to write about the Internet and what it's done to reading and writing. And it's definitely changed. It changed the level of discourse. You know, I've been trying to read Henry James and Dr. Johnson recently and the complexity and the subtlety of the syntax, I find that I couldn't deal with it anymore. And I used to read Henry James at university and it took me a long while to get back into it. So it's shaping and changing our minds definitely. We have to see what we can do. I've just been on holiday in Italy, and they did - they have a Slow Food movement there... you know, you sit down for a meal and it's prepared with local ingredients. And it's a time to fight back against the fast food thing. And I thought, you know, we kind of need a Slow Language movement."

(A slow language movement, I thought. I like it. What comes to mind is the long sentence. How about a celebration of the long sentence. A moment each day; no, an hour early in the morning before the day-to-day intrudes, disrupts, robs. Or at night, when the sky sweeps itself of color and hurtles you into black. Two hours. I put my blinker on, switched over to the right lane of the freeway. Reread Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce...)

"...poetry is kind of an unacknowledged Slow Language movement and the idea that language is important in itself and does more than, you know, be denotative or whatever, it has connotations, and worth to be looked at slowly and quietly."

(Poetry. Read Brian Teare's Sight Map. It was in my bag. Fall in love again with the cumulative sentence. Gertrude Stein comes to mind: "Why should a sequence of words be anything but pleasure?" I pulled into the driveway, turned the engine off, but left the radio playing. Two boys in the street tossed a baseball back and forth. Smack! Into the mit. A black bird perched on the telephone wire.) 

"...in an age of sort of Twitter and Facebook, and all the rest of it, where language is just witty and snappy, and quick, and meant to amuse rather than kind of be any profound in any way, and certainly the brevity of it sort of precludes that, you got to make time for poetry and other things as well."

(I open Site Map to a random page. ((Why demand order when the idea is pleasure?))

"Theory of Trees"

if narrow/if limbs/white, also/ are given/skin cousin/to paper....)