Other Cl/utter

found text

have-we-always-been-afraid.doc

Found-texts can be fragments. We come to fragments every day, and probably don’t realize it – overhearing a conversation on the bus; meeting someone new; reading part of an article, even reading it in its entirety is a fragment of the larger story which we can never fully know. I am a fragment to you and you to me. We cannot share everything – this is impossible since we are constantly being created. So we must choose; or sometimes the choices are made for us. Have we always been afraid? was written to imitate a page torn-out of a larger story. It is complete as a fragment, as a found-text, as incomplete in its completeness. For isn’t this how we come to history, or any story in a sense? Order and our tendency to organize are not necessarily because it is truth, but because it is easier. It is easier to this or that; black or white; beginning, middle and end things. Fragments are messier, more complicated and more likely. They are open fields. Starting points. They are often are all we get. And are lovely in and of themselves.

Catherine Paquette is a Montreal-based writer. Her work has appeared in publications such as brokenpencil, misunderstandings magazine, Vallum: contemporary poetry, and Fireweed. Her long-poem chapbook ‘the burden of a song’ was recently published by Mercutio Press (Montreal).