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The Event of a Thread

$19.00

Patterns, sounds, weaves morph, like the collective behaviour you see in murmurations of sparrows, where massed in flight together the flock shape-shifts and a new form emerges. They pose a new challenge to the flow of memory and its narrative configurations, where time is replaced by a connected sequence of frozen moments. What we mean by ‘right now’ is a mysterious thing which we cannot define and we cannot affect, but it can affect us later, or we could have affected it if we had done something far enough in the past. All that we had previously judged to be continuous turned out instead to be discrete, and the fragmentary scenes that haunt my memories are obsessive in character. There is neither a past nor a future, at least, not for me, just as a smoothly continuous linen sheet is an illusion created by its finely interwoven threads of flax or cotton. And so I thought, I will take the thread everywhere I can.

David Lloyd,
from The Event of a Thread

Patterns, sounds, weaves morph, like the collective behaviour you see in murmurations of sparrows, where massed in flight together the flock shape-shifts and a new form emerges. They pose a new challenge to the flow of memory and its narrative configurations, where time is replaced by a connected sequence of frozen moments. What we mean by ‘right now’ is a mysterious thing which we cannot define and we cannot affect, but it can affect us later, or we could have affected it if we had done something far enough in the past. All that we had previously judged to be continuous turned out instead to be discrete, and the fragmentary scenes that haunt my memories are obsessive in character. There is neither a past nor a future, at least, not for me, just as a smoothly continuous linen sheet is an illusion created by its finely interwoven threads of flax or cotton. And so I thought, I will take the thread everywhere I can.

David Lloyd,
from The Event of a Thread

About the Author

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David Lloyd

David Lloyd is an Irish-born poet, playwright and critic currently living in Los Angeles. Among his books of poetry are Arc & Sill: Poems, 1979-2009 (Shearsman, 2012) and The Harm Fields (Georgia Review Books, 2022), as well as two chapbooks, Terra Terra (2022) and Furrow Archive (2020) from Magra Books. In 2025, The Press, Shelter and the Pact: Three Playsappeared from Three Count Pour in Chicago. His most recent critical books include Beckett’s Thing: Painting and Theatre (Edinburgh U. Press, 2016) and Counterpoetics of Modernity: On Irish Poetry and Modernism(Edinburgh, 2022). Lloyd is a professor emeritus of English at the U. of California, Riverside.

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Acclaim

Shot through with Anni Albers’ On Weaving, the iridescent Event of a Thread weaves with its predecessor not merely in the sense of textual source material about textile materials but in the rhythmic sense of a supple slant dance: tangence and obliquity; bob and weave; feint and lunge; cast and wave. “We have to parry the material,” Albers’ avers, and adjust to its demands. That interaction between medium and process is what, Albers argues, results in form. The form here, accordingly, is less prose poem or cut-up collage than intellectual enmeshment. One event of a thread is the read that can be read out of it.

— Craig Dworkin