The January-February (2026) edition of Poetry magazine features a wealth of thought-provoking poems, including George Szirtes’ “Lynchian: a moving shadow,” which does for shadows and trees what Wallace Stevens once did for the veritable ocean. Each of its five stanzas opens with the same line: “A moving shadow, nothing, just a tree,” before unreeling a cinematic scene. One can easily envision a camera drone prowling a suburban neighborhood from just above the trees, capturing the barren streets, park, and train station—and, too, spying through windows as if a peeping tom. Towards the end, Szirtes addresses the root name of “Lynchian,” filmmaker David Lynch, and leans on the songs sung by the natural world. He asks, “Are you listening, David?/And music pours from the trees in copious bars/as if living were a matter of moving shadows.”
It’s a stark conceit, that last line. Life unfurls, unravels, unwinds, unspools, with nary a cut nor crossfade to spice up or speed along the proceedings. We blink away the years, the tears, the loved ones lost, and wake again tomorrow—until, one day, we don’t. The same’s true of the ephemera of long ago, too. Many of us remember flipping through newspapers and magazines that eventually succumbed to the pressures of the marketplace; I fear that blogs and personal websites are next on the docket. If Google’s Gemini, ChatGPT or whatever AI spits out a succinct summary, why click through the footnote? I’m sure most won’t.
Which is all to say, of late, I’ve been thinking about the future of this blog—a moving shadow if ever there was one. It’s a hobby, a pastime, something I do for fun, not profit. I’m beholden to no one. I’ve primarily focused on new and unheralded artists over the past few years, from folk-flavored singer-songwriters to yesteryear-styled rock bands to practitioners of the avant-garde, while occasionally making forays into the works of lifetime favorites, and that recipe has resulted in more views and visitors than ever.
My primary resolution for 2026 is to maintain the same focus, but tweak the formula just a little bit—more Essentials and themed Top 5s, in other words. Another resolution: make room for more of the “other stuff” that I enjoy writing about, from WordPress’s freeform Daily Prompts to Movies & TV to poetry.
The Old Grey Cat 