Welcome, an introduction

There's a way in which I've been meaning to sit down and do this for a while now. Part of it, I think, is that despite a history of relatively small resistances to such an act, I increasingly find myself  taken up with my computer. I can't say for sure if this is a good thing, or a bad one. Likely, it is both. Part of the reason for this is that my medium of choice, poetry, is connected to the act in ways I never thought would happen, or rather, in ways that happened faster and with a greater amount of humanity, creativity, and grace than I originally imagined possible.-- (For a counter-argument, check out Wendell Berry's "Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer") -- A more directly personal reason, but by no means personally unique, is that over the course of the last ten years I constantly find myself swept up in the business of leaving. The places I have lived in, the people that inhabit and define these places, exist, for the most part, in a space with which I am emotionally uneasy. In about a month, I move to Bangkok, Thailand on a Fulbright Fellowship where I will live, study, and write for the next ten months. Wisconsin, Montana, and Iowa will, for the most part, be  shadow-cast and out of reach. The family, friends, and fellow writers whose lives and actions I depend on, they, in like manner, will exist, at least to me, as distant versions of themselves, smaller somehow, less tangibly defined. I do not, however, harbor any expectations that this or any other medium can do what I might ask of it, primarily that it bring us all a little closer. Nor do most of the people I foresee missing give a shit about poetry, especially southeast Asian poetry, or of my thinking of it, or of my attempts and failures to think of it as the case may be, but I will do my best to think and write of when and where I am, to tell, as Oppen so vehemently advices each of us to do, what happens in a life, what choices present themselves, what the world is in the locality of when and where it is we find ourselves. For me, this locality will soon be Thailand and the space carved out by what her poets have to say about her. I am, for the record, sincerely grateful for this, for the opportunity to think and talk and listen to a specific place and point in time in the world to which I am, at least by blood, connected. If this is a task that I must, to some degree, fail at, then, at the very least, I will do  my best to document that failure in a way which is hopefully worth the time it takes to watch it breaking down. Thanks.