Here's what conspired to create the project currently present and known as Rowses. Casually presented, thoroughly inspected. In case you were curious.

1 THE RISE OF SHORT FORM "CONTENT"

Everywhere we are lamenting the shortening of attention spans—or in the case of Netflix, the total disintegration of it, to which Netflix says it's not going down without a fight and has started making suggestions not of how to make films worth paying attention to but how to make films for people who aren't even paying attention. It's not a theory or future state. It's a presently pervasive fact. But the thing about facts is that they are rarely ever the truth. What the facts point to. So here's the thing maybe we ought to wonder about. Sure, it's a terrible thing that no one can pay attention to anything anymore and that somehow, within the last five years, we've gone from a descent into full-on immersion, the consequences of social media and attention engineering in full force so harrowing yet ubiquitous it feels like everything everywhere is getting worse. We're comparing where we are to what we knew, those of us who've been here long enough to know it, at least. But what if we're looking at one bar of the whole song? What does it mean to lose attention? Are we morally corrupt for having (d)evolved to need constant stimulation? Sure, the companies behind this have everything to gain. But adopting the refusal to believe that we're changing for the worse, the question to grasp then becomes: what can we gain from the quantifiable, uproar of interest in short-form content? Sure, it can look like that, but what if it looked and felt like art? I mean, who knew that "poet" (sans entering academia) would become a income-generating profession for so many by the force of short-form content? If the container of what is considered "good" no longer fits, how can we leverage the new state to our collective advantage? Can such a world exist? If people are the inventors, regardless of where and how and why the technology was built, what are we creating? Don't hate the game (go ahead, hate the players); play the game your way.

Ted Gioia writes, "Many entertainment companies have destroyed themselves by playing this game of dumb and dumber with the audience."

So I think I want to try to play it poetic.

Sidenote to self: I guess what I'm saying is the trojan horse can be whatever.

2 GRAFFITI 

Example: I wasn't looking to be educated on graffiti. The algorithm fed it to me, among many other things I would've never come across on my own accord. I didn't even mean to keep watching. But I did because the short etymology lesson hooked me. (Graffiti is Latin for "scratched".) And then this at 0:28:

It's kind of funny to think that we like to assert that art is intuitive, the very loud subtext being that only certain people of taste and wealth have it. But it seems to me that art is contingent on exposure, education, and participation. 

We have always been spectators, but we haven't always been creators. And I'm not saying that everyone has to be an artist or poet and certainly not professionally, but that we can all use art to shape our perception and view of the world, if not on streets like graffiti artists and corporations buying up ad spots on billboards and skyscrapers, then in our own homes.

3 "EVERYTHING IS ROMANTIC" / LANGUAGE AS TECHNOLOGY

By that concept, it seems obvious that language is technology. Most people don't think of it this way though. Technology is cast as industrial, mechanic, progressive. Language is cast as its opposite, romantic almost. A person who can speak multiple languages is thought of quite differently as a person who can program in multiple languages. But like one of my favourite songs this past summer from Charli XCX, I'd like to think everything is romantic.

One of the best demonstrations is Arrival, the 2016 film. Recently, I found out there's a scientific theory for language's ability to shape experience: the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and more generally, linguistic relativity. Each year, I find myself becoming more interested in both science and poetry, and finding more similarities and fractals. 

There is this sense now of "we've seen it all". No we haven't. There is always more science and more poetry.

4 "POETRY IS NOT A LUXURY" BY AUDRE LORDE (1985)

So many have tried to articulate the power of poetry, and this essay is among the best. The argument for poetry as an essential force is undoubtedly lost on most, even among the most avid readers. But it wouldn't be the first time we've got our priorities mixed up.

An excerpt: 

For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday morning at 7 AM, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth; while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths.

5 SUPERMARKET 

As a kid, every trip to the supermarket with my family was a ritual and negotiation between desire and dollars. When I "grew up", one of the first markers of independence was going by myself and filling a cart with everything I wanted. One time when I was living alone I bought myself an 8" whole vanilla buttercream cake. I felt like I'd made it. 

The supermarket is democratic (anyone can enter and purchase as little or as much), necessary (you always need to buy food), and convenient (it's all in one place). Bonus points if it's well organized. Extra bonus points if there are killer end caps and checkout aisle upsells. I love shopping like this. I think I like it more than the feeling of walking through most art galleries. 

At the supermarket, our eyes scan row by row, our last stop as hunters before we turn into consumers.

6 ROSES ARE RED, VIOLETS ARE BLUE

In 2021, I started a newsletter called Violets. Every week, I presented a new poetry collection from a living poet in the form of an adventure. By 2023, I had burned out again trying to make something click. 

And then in 2024, I was fed a TikTok by algorithm, of someone who was talking about how some of the worst people, the people who whine the most, who care too much about strangers, are the people who have repressed their creative selves. I don't know how far this theory goes when it comes to terrible people who are great artists, but I'm willing to bet that this person was somewhat right and that there are plenty of people who are more terrible than they actually are, just because they have all this energy going nowhere. 

Anyway, that was me. I started the project because I had racked my brain trying to create something that would draw more people into poetry, without realizing that the best way was to invite people to live inside and around and with poetry. 

This was a slip of paper that fell out of a book I borrowed from the library in November 2022, a few months before the idea for a poetry store was planted in my head, a few months before the name came to me, a few months before I purchased the domain, a few months before I compiled the first collection from poems I had already written, a few months before I wrote the second collection, a few months before today, when I am writing long form "content" for my soon-to-be-live poetry store.