![]() I think he said what a big fucking deal this was, for the Library of America to be publishing Joe alongside Melville and Whitman: Joe-a skinny, queer, glasses-wearing art student from Tulsa.īrainard started writing his memoir I Remember in 1969, when he was twenty-seven, while staying in Vermont, along with the poet James Schuyler. One day, Gizzi mentioned that the Library of America was publishing Joe Brainard’s collected works. I was in Peter Gizzi’s workshop, doing a poetry MFA at UMass. I don’t remember why I needed labs done, but I remember why I bought the book. One day last fall, I found a receipt from Amherst Books, dated a decade prior, stuck in my copy of The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard, along with instructions for fasting before blood work from UMass’s University Health Services. Yet he also acknowledged its existential hold: “The present can last an eternity … Its overness is never over.” When Swift ushers listeners through that door in the first line, the listener steps toward a perpetual present, a place where the overness of past love is never truly over, “ ’cause,” as the chorus goes, echoing Dolly Parton, “there we are again.” As Janet Burroway notes in Writing Fiction, “the effect of the present tense, somewhat self-consciously, is to reduce distance and increase immediacy: we are there.” But are we there? And where is there? The present is a “ parched and barren country,” William Gass has written. In writing workshops, the present tense is often perceived as a lazy shortcut. In the ten-minute version of “All Too Well,” forty-nine lines are in past and forty-seven are in present. The first three lines of the verse are written in simple past, but the fourth shifts to present perfect, foreshadowing the showdown to come between tenses. Verse one opens in scene: “I walked through the door with you, the air was cold.” The door is the door to an ex-lover’s sister’s house, where Swift has forgotten a scarf. By the second, third, or fifth listen of a run, all I could think about was point of view, verb tense, and one of the few “craft” words I like: temporality, which sounds so much more well behaved than time. “All I felt was shame.” “All Too Well (10 Minute Version)”-which broke the Guinness World Record for longest song to hit number one on Billboard’s Hot 100-is also a master class in the present tense. “You never called it what it was,” Swift sings. It’s a power ballad, the story of a dissolved romance that haunts the speaker, who is still hurting over the cruelties of the relationship. ![]() The song had just been released on Red (Taylor’s Version), the 2021 rerecording of her fourth album, which came out in 2012. The five-minute original is like getting cheated out of an orgasm. For me, there is only the ten-minute version. Five took me around the lake and to the dock where I stretched. recommended Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version)” as an exercise soundtrack soon, I was clocking my runs by it. ![]() ![]() Last year, I began running the trail at Lake Storey in Galesburg, Illinois, where I live. ![]()
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