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If Languages are like eco systems, if the Text is a vast eco system, it continuously positions both Writer & Reader. Who is going to be the bottom feeder? Who is going to be the predator? If social antagonisms ‘out there’ typically recur in the antagonisms of poetic practice, how does a Reader register them, or co-sign them? Or create ‘Value’: based on affect/identification/pleasure, or on instruction/alienation & saying No to certain forms of pleasure. If ‘estrangement’ is still at the core of what we all do; if estrangement always seems like a good thing: why? Estrangement isn’t static; it has to be done again & again. Nor is it automatic. Do your verbs! Or rework your diction, rhetoric, strategy, voice. To make forms that impede business as usual. And open the possibility of instability, or ‘midrashic antinomianism’: by who? for who? If we do think we have to discriminate; if some directions seem more fruitful than others: why not think of ‘the between’ more? — sharing connective tissue with another category. What is your principle of exclusion? Or, what’s so great about the call to defamiliarize, detourn, irritate, etc. — or placing disturbing language in bodies, in embodied performance or ‘enactments of reciprocal alterity’ or the ‘phatic’ slipping into noise. Maybe the procedures need to be site-specific — but in relation to a Reader. As, for instance, the agent of going back to fix something that was broken; of Memory — as a restored building that inherits the ruins of its predecessor. With performance soliciting rather than ‘enacting’ a viable ‘shiftarama’ of social meaning. Are we registering disjunctive or micro-temporalities — or are we soliciting Readers’ (complicit or critical) engagement with those temporalities? If echolocation is coming into contact with an unknown environment, as a ‘textual sonar’ it is bouncing signals off Readers, as Reading & Writing keep adjusting their positions. And where readerly affect is what activates the political stakes for poetry, its so-called ‘activism of the soul’; its ‘interrogation’ of markers of nation-state, class, ethnicity, gender; its foregrounding or privileging or deployment of ‘radical particularity’; its claims to be fashioning a new public or counter-public sphere. If neo-liberalism involves capital’s continuing accumulation by dispossession, I don’t think we want to be stuck with a parallel dispossession of the Reader by Autonomous Text or Eccentric Author.