instance of enthusiasm

if suddenly you feel you can live and breathe where you are

On November 9, 2025, poet Angel Nafis shared an invitation to a poetry salon she curates and hosts. Here is where I let out a large sigh. This invitation was one of the most powerful things I have encountered lately (ever). It climbed inside of my psyche and heart, it detonated something in me.¹ I guess that’s what we call awe, I guess that’s what we call enthusiasm. I wonder if it resonated so acutely, achingly, made me so upset (not in a bad way) because I think it was actually about enthusiasm too. There’s a way that such beauty and excellence are kind of rude, and I think they feel rude because they are affronting? “Most people are wholly unprepared for their enormity.”² So when our enormity is reflected to us, pointed out to us, even if by way of another person’s splendor — it’s kind of like, how dare you?

This is one type of how, in Nafis’s words:

Probably, at this point, it’s safe to say I’ve listened to hundreds of thousands of poems and stories and stories that are poems. And in those readings, sometimes, when I’m especially lucky, there is a moment when the poet (seemingly inexplicably) locks IN to their reading and everything but the poem stills. The air, our breath, time itself I swear—all still! And the poem expands outward and cloaks us all in more life—enhances the second, the molecule. And we take our eyes off the poet only long enough to look at each other to confirm the sheer depth of the going downness taking place. It’s a collective, cultivated presence. Honed into a pinpoint, the coordinates are us. It is a feeling like no other and one I actively seek out and bend my days around.

Poets embodying the poem.

Some people have millions of dollars but I know, have known since I was 16, a different kind of wealth. People meaning what they’re saying to the point of tonic.

(yes, I’ll be there, for god’s sake, what time?).

Another large sigh here, and some teeth sucking, and what the hell, man and speechlessness. Are you kidding? TO THE POINT OF TONIC! And what a tonic it is, I for one am refreshed, restored, rejuvenated. This type of poets embodying the poem make the little hairs on our arms uncrouch and stand at attention, give us the chills.

This invitation is a little story of enthusiasm, a witnessing of poets opening themselves to their own words, their own telling — to the majesty and intimacy that words can sometimes summon, offer, bear; gd splendor.

Enthusiasm is this kind of rapture, a willingness to be possessed by the moment, to bestow our full attention on each other fully, or on each other’s work (i.e. “we take our eyes off the poet only long enough to look at each other to confirm the depth of the going downness…” i.e. look!). Whew. These moments are big enough to live in, to live on. Jess Rowe’s chimes in here too “But I’ll take it, I’ve felt it, I’ve known it: the reconciled world, the other world that is not just possible but here. It took me a long time to admit...”³

I am beginning to think that attention is the bridge to this world, to the worlds inside and outside of the regular, beleaguered, cruel world. As the friends of attention state, “True attention takes the unlivable and makes it livable. It is a lung that replenishes the air it breathes. If suddenly you feel that you can live and breathe in the place where you are, you or someone around you has committed, enacted, or bestowed attention. This is our work.”⁴

I’m calling for tonic. Meaning made is meaning heard, is at the top of our lungs and ever so quiet. “We have not stopped trembling yet.”⁵

1. For a while I have worried that I only know how to convey emphasis and even wonder by invoking violence. I think this might be true and I don’t know if it’s necessarily bad anymore. I think there is a distinction to be made between violence and force, I haven’t wrapped my head around it…..especially because so much violence is subtle. Violence has a threatening, injurious connotation, yet, there are many occasions where I feel that violence is appropriate, and that force can be caring and life affirming. Birth and growth are violent, ferocious. Seeds wield force to bust out of their casings, growing pains are involved. Ferociousness belongs….I have been rescued (emotionally, spiritually) by what at first feels like violence but is really just interruption, disruption — which needs to be proportionate or stronger than my own refusal or delusion. Anyway, if you have thoughts or questions or things to read/listen to about this that you want to share I welcome them.

2. A Year to Live, Stephen Levine, 123

3. Jess Rowe, White Flights, “Eating the Blame: The Question of Reparative Writing”

4. 12 Theses on Attention - Thank you Stevie for putting me on!

5. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time