There is a moment when a human being walks into a camera’s view which, devoid of any narrative we might honor it, is simply that, a moment, a dot on a timeline as a bee’s stinger suspended above a meadow. Yet it is profound, the semblance of immortality. The same camera which killed painting is insentient, judgeless, uncaring — yet turned into an ethical machine, as we appoint it objectivity, the auspices of “what happened” via residual files inside a memory card smaller and smoother than a cat’s tongue. We expectantly look and point at shapes similar to us, no longer inside the camera, but displayed on screens by signals detached from the original event, now portrayed in numbers, binary code, recollated into bands of color, thru four channels, or something, physical parameters we barely understand like the spill-shaped universe itself. And here, somewhere in a parking lot, in the western hemisphere, at some point in this current century, two people displaced light’s refraction, inadvertently asserted their contours, the man observing the evolutionary pause of his member’s intraface with his partner’s mouth, how funny and endearing that act is, and multiple men weeks or months or years later would semi-emotionally reappropriate these images by funneling them into their minds, to the smaller universe between their synapses, forever lodged in some lobe in their brain, some desperate corner, the original event now something greater, surgically deeper. This is porn.

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Gregory Sherl is the author of the excellent poetry collection Heavy Petting (my review, here, at Diode). I’ve always admired the sensuality and openness of his writing so we talked about the way he exposes himself in his poetry, Ryan Gosling’s satin jacket in Drive, and the matter of fucking in poetry.

What is your obsession as a writer?

Trying to stop myself from being so desperately aware that I’m a writer. Or maybe my obsession is figuring out how to pay for healthcare when my only income comes from being an Adjunct English Instructor. Or maybe it’s me obsessing over obsessing about the fact that I need to apply for my MFA like today but not doing it because writing new poems is better than putting old poems together in a packet with some stamps on it. Or maybe it’s watching the doctor try to figure out the right cocktail of medication so I don’t sleep nineteen hours in one day. Or maybe it’s trying to watchFelicity in its entirety as quickly as possible (a little over two weeks, I believe). Or maybe these aren’t my obsessions as a writer but my obsessions as me but I’m a writer so I think it fits.

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True to his plan, arrogant and contemptuous of an opponent’s worth as never before, Ali opened the fight flat-footed in the center of the ring, his hands whipping out and back like the pistons of an enormous and magnificent engine. Much broader than he has ever been, the look of swift destruction defined by his every move, Ali seemed indestructible. Once, so long ago, he had been a splendidly plumed bird who wrote on the wind a singular kind of poetry of the body, but now he was down to earth, brought down by the changing shape of his body, by a sense of his own vulnerability, and by the years of excess. Dancing was for a ballroom; the ugly hunt was on. Head up and unprotected, Frazier stayed in the mouth of the cannon, and the big gun roared again and again.

And, you know, this. Whatever.

And could anyone point me to better next-day Kram (or same) writing about sports? RIP literary sports writing, like of the event, once the actual norm before the YELLING. YELLING is now sports reporting, eh? Get off my YAWN. Who writes very well about sports now? I ask you. I ask. I mean in Good Faith: I’ll read your answer.

RIP Joe Frazier.