Notes on the title of this blog

The phrase “tender small blank” comes from a poem by Mark Strand, “What It Was.” Four months ago, I bought New Selected Poems, which includes the finest from ten of Strand’s poetry collections published between 1963 and 2006. It’s nice to know that I am as old as Strand’s earliest book (or earliest published poem). Well, Wikipedia lists Sleeping with One Eye Open as his first book, published in 1964. But the copyright page of New Selected Poems cites this: “Reasons for Moving © 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968.” So there. I might as well begin with 1963. Forty-nine years of filling in the blanks. Or just letting all that white space float.

I like the idea that there are blanks small enough not to engulf the mind. I like the word tender because the world out there can be harsh or indifferent. And I like the diversity, the possibilities, of tenderness. Doctors know that “tender” means sensitive to touch. Freedictionary.com offers “easily crushed or bruised; fragile.” Yes, there is that offer, too. Lawyers know that a tender is “an unconditional offer made by one to another to enter into the contract of goods or services at certain specified cost” (legal-explanations.com). Stockbrokers know that a tender is “an offer to purchase some or all of shareholders' shares in a corporation” at a price “premium to the market price” (investopedia.com).

And what do I know? That this blog is an offer to make sense of the fragile, often daunting, blank. That this blog grew out of my attempts on my other blog, Sticking Around, to connect words and pictures. Tender Small Blank is a space for notes on the art of staying sane, the business of moving on and keeping still. It’s not a space for book reviews (many bloggers are already doing those much better than I can). It's for book reminiscences and other detours in nostalgia and wishful thinking. Tender Small Blank is where I gush and whine, geek out and mope around, resist and cherish distractions. This is where I read faces in photographs, stare at wounds, look out windows. This is where I gather things and people worth sticking around for.

To borrow Mark Strand’s words in “What It Was,” perhaps this blog is nothing but—

. . . a something, a smallness,
A dot, a speck, a speck within a speck, an endless depth
Of smallness; a song, but less than a song, something drowning
Into itself, something going, a flood of sound, but less
Than a sound; the last of it, the blank of it,
The tender small blank of it filling its echo, and falling,
And rising unnoticed, and falling again, and always thus,
And always because, and only because, once having been, it was . . .

On this blog, I will keep listening to that flood of sound. I will keep filling echoes and pages and hours. Feeding doubts. Rambling on. Breathing through the tender small blank. Always because. Only because.

[Illustration by dabacahin. Excerpt from “What It Was”: New Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), page 235.]