31:Td78,md`*While wishing this was ...* is one of those poems that arise from particular moments of inspiration. In this case, these moments clustered together during readings by other writers. The resulting poem was and is impersonal in that it was produced from these occasions, but became personal because I am old enough myself to have experienced and to be experiencing a few ‘last times.’ Molly Schaeffer gave me the or my renewed sense of ‘the’ or ‘my’ as also shifters. At a reading I heard Xandria Phillips explain ‘first times’ as way of understanding their poetic investment in childhood and this is part of what led me to those *last* times which all of us will sooner or later meet with. A marvellous reader, Garret Stewart has given me a clearer understanding of ambiguous segmentation and much else. In this context it is perhaps worth mentioning that ambiguous segmentation – anything syntactical, including words as sequences of whatever, that can be parsed and read in more than one way – is something that currently eludes the textual presumptions of computation. A dream poetics workshop given by Jackie Wang provided the necessary (but not sufficient) cause of this poem. As I audited the workshop, I heard Wang offer a prompt to make something from selected dream records in [*The World Dream Atlas*](https://www.facebook.com/worlddreamatlas/) by Roc Morin. The materials provided from this source included this from Detroit, USA, “I dreamed that I awoke as an old man. There was a note on my bed that read, ‘Today is the last day of your life. Tell no one.’ So, I went through my day, crying the whole time. All of my loved ones asked what was wrong, and I said nothing. That evening, I returned to my bedroom. I opened French doors into this beautiful garden in my backyard full of luxurious flowers. I walked through a gazebo to a tranquil pool. There was an orb of light at the bottom of the pool and I stood at the edge gazing down at it. Then, I fell forward, and that was the end of the dream.” But, since I am wary of my own poetry as such, I do not think I would have attempted to publish this work if I had not be able to animate it. I feel unsure about whether it would ever have done enough ‘on the page’ to justify just being there. Then also an encounter with the tools of audiovisual ‘alignment’ gave me to understand that it would be possible, relatively easily, to capture times for the constituent moments of a recorded vocal performance, and to use these times to animate the typographic rendering of a poem with the pace and rhythms of an individual voice but without its timbre, without the aural identifiers of things like class, accent as indicator of origin, etc. This immediately fascinated me and still does. Elsewhere, I’ve written on what I call *aurature* and here we have a literal and silent manifestation of aurature. I could say much more about all this but my hope is rather that readers will mull over the consequences and potentials. In this regard, however, I would like to offer much thanks to [reduct.video](reduct.video) and in particular to this company’s CTO, Robert Ochshorn. Robert’s generosity has allowed my students and myself to experiment with capturing the alignment of poetic and other recordings and thus to animate the typography of a small number of works (thus far) according to the vocal pace and rhythms of certain language animals.`32:T3f0d,embeddableSpans = "I am an old man in the note you left me I read and hear that this is the last time for flowers my own last time for the luxury of flowers this is the last time that I will open the French doors the last time that I will pass and return over their threshold this is my last time to walk in the garden at night my last time to gaze into the pool this is my last time to drown in the moon ’s reflection or to follow its path on the water this is the last time that I will return this way to where we sleep together these are my last times and no return to beautiful, to my or to this last one, to tranquil, or yet to wrong, to times all utter ’d living time’s im providence and no, no return to un returning, to tell no, to tell no one the last or just my own return to no one"33:T708,verseText = html`I am an old man in the note you left me I read and hear that this is the last time for flowers my own last time for the luxury of flowers this is the last time that I will open the French doors the last time that I will pass and return over their threshold this is my last time to walk in the garden at night my last time to gaze into the pool this is my last time to drown in the moon ’s reflection or to follow its path on the water this is the last time that I will return this way to where we sleep together these are my last times and no return to beautiful, to my or to this last one, to tranquil, or yet to wrong, to times all utter ’d living time’s im providence and no, no return to un returning, to tell no, to tell no one the last or just my own return to no one `34:[{"id":"ba9e9fcf036aa95bcd1a88fe67624170cd3ce47660cf3b626f286f2fe5386f82a7169169f123a4c9b0728e069267af4d417ed44e888d728bf272ff6c5461bde6","href":"https://static.observableusercontent.com/files/ba9e9fcf036aa95bcd1a88fe67624170cd3ce47660cf3b626f286f2fe5386f82a7169169f123a4c9b0728e069267af4d417ed44e888d728bf272ff6c5461bde6","name":"whilewishing_versed.json","type":"application/json","lastModified":1620940171356.592,"size":11143},{"id":"f2e4a91c7e0f5d1ae966eb08b1fecea26481772e5e509f2ab43e3f893379a3a319d35a7661f0bee1b8bc31425cd40c97bac92f52a52693932ec79b3a3f5febfc","href":"https://static.observableusercontent.com/files/f2e4a91c7e0f5d1ae966eb08b1fecea26481772e5e509f2ab43e3f893379a3a319d35a7661f0bee1b8bc31425cd40c97bac92f52a52693932ec79b3a3f5febfc","name":"whilewishing_lineated.json","type":"application/json","lastModified":1620940171356.592,"size":11069},{"id":"20d7d73f5f5198e4f681c5c0e9df35ce968fc3936707e0486aff5b0f9206baccca23dbb3e90f845e9ad35add52006770724aa60d4f6924f6b22055258f482c25","href":"https://static.observableusercontent.com/files/20d7d73f5f5198e4f681c5c0e9df35ce968fc3936707e0486aff5b0f9206baccca23dbb3e90f845e9ad35add52006770724aa60d4f6924f6b22055258f482c25","name":"whilewishing_raw@2.json","type":"application/json","lastModified":1620940171356.592,"size":10938},{"id":"5b8df561bfd8ac47f1dde36226142eeece26b752bb9de1731aededeb174428e755b87f30655923996246a39cec5215a12876f06e86c71d1089403e84ee7c5886","href":"https://static.observableusercontent.com/files/5b8df561bfd8ac47f1dde36226142eeece26b752bb9de1731aededeb174428e755b87f30655923996246a39cec5215a12876f06e86c71d1089403e84ee7c5886","name":"whilewishing.mp3","type":"audio/mpeg","lastModified":1620940171356.592,"size":1891541}] 2f:{"title":"While wishing this was someone else’s dream","cells":[{"id":0,"value":"html`

While wishing this was someone else’s dream

JOHN CAYLEY, MAR 2021

${LAOB} / THE WORK`","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs"},{"id":391,"value":"$31","pinned":false,"hidden":false,"mode":"ojs"},{"id":68,"value":"textcontainer = html`
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