Abstract

In 2020, Erica McAlpine authored a book-length study of mistakes in poetry called The Poet’s Mistake. The poet who wrote TENSILE, by their own assessment, has made a lot of them. Not merely an exercise in self-flagellation, these poems explore how the poet’s particular strategies for structuring their reality lead mistakes to proliferate wildly in their perceptual field like an invasive weed. What is happening, at the level of the body, affect, language, interpretation, family, cognition, and behaviour, to open up such vast horizons of humiliation? And is there even some beauty to be found in this patterning? What other vistas could be carved out of the landscape? What of work, for example—where might there be playfulness within its restrictions? Robert Frost says, “You don’t want a freedom from the tennis court, you want the freedom of the tennis court, with the net just so high and the court just so large, always.” Perhaps, then, play is the way out. Not just the desultory play of signifiers, but the play of children whose moves in every moment of the spontaneous game are contingent, intrinsically motivated acts of discovery.