Dealing with Uncertainty

Poetry fearlessly enters the horizon of the unknowable, the fuzzy. It lives there. That is why it is so significant in an uncertain, threatened time like ours.

But you can’t optimize systems in a context that’s changing, especially if it’s changing in unpredictable ways. Removing inefficiencies when circumstances are as anticipated means that there isn’t much slack in the system to respond when the unanticipated happens. Optimization is intrinsically brittle , because it’s about closely matching the

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Poetry knows the spaces of transition; it traverses and expands them. Poems live in uncertainty.

Different as it sounds, this kind of triumphalism had something in common with paralysed heartbreak. One rested in arrogant assurance, while the other rested in despair. Both saw the future as something offstage, rather than as the thing we were always creating in every moment, whether we acknowledged it or not. And both forgot that essential truth

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