In this year’s heteropessimist horror movie Obsession, boyfriend Bear pleads with his possessed girlfriend Nikki, “Stop moving so weird!” It’s a funny, fourth-wall-tapping wink to the audience, noting out loud the film cliché whereby a sense of the demonic (particularly the female demonic) is conveyed by making a character move at a frame rate all her own—a skittering, insect-like effect that makes limbs appear both more mechanical and more repugnant than they otherwise would.

The original term for this special effect was “undercranking,” referring to the manual crank that controlled the frame rate of early movie cameras. Slowing down the number of frames recording per second will make an action appear faster and jerkier when played back at normal speed. The Dadaists used this gleefully and compulsively (see René Clair and Francis Picabia’s wacky Entr’Acte ); so, famously, did Hideo Nakata in Y2K hit The Ring and countless imitators.

I think we are inexorably repulsed and fascinated by natural motion made unnatural through subtle changes of speed and timing. The difference between one frame rate and another can be the difference between wanting to ogle a voluptuous demon and wanting to squish her like a bug. So, too, with “unnatural” alterations of natural sound: I remember the prickly feeling of being a teenager on my bedroom carpet, so spooked by the final vocal loop at the end of The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” that I didn’t dare move for fear that some unspeakable horror would reach out of the Sixties and throttle me. And I remember, in that same summer, on that same carpet, poring endlessly over the garbled hook in Missy Elliott’s “Work It”: the internet being less comprehensive than it is now, it took serious self-study to convince myself that she was not only putting her thing down and flipping it, but yes, in fact, reversing it. The line between dread and pleasure within the realm of the temporally-uncanny is a fine one.

There are many ways to become obsessed with life’s frame rate, with the varying speed of an action and the way that time can be sliced or spun in the presentation.

The earliest experiments with the moving image and with recorded sound knew this; so too have any number of great poets, perhaps particularly those whose lives put them in special touch with cameras, clocks, and calendars. Parent-poets, poets writing on lunchbreak from their punch-clock jobs, poet-filmmakers and poet-photographers, poets who’ve watched the tracing of a fetal heart rate monitor or a cardiac defibrillator—there are many ways to become obsessed with life’s frame rate, with the varying speed of an action and the way that time can be sliced or spun in the presentation.

I am writing this essay to explain myself. To explain a stylistic choice I fumbled for with the un-grace of a salmon bucking its way up a waterfall, not quite knowing why. That is, I first wrote a chronological, even diaristic book—an account, in poems, of my life during pregnancy and roughly the first year of parenthood—but found that it only made sense to me, and perhaps became art, when in revision I rearranged the manuscript backwards. Questions and progressions that had seemed so universal to the point of being scarcely worth articulating ( should I have a child? am I pregnant? am I visibly pregnant? what is this slither moving inside me? I am hurting, now, and a baby is coming out ) could be shocked into defamiliarization through pressing “rewind” or “pause,” altering frame rates, shaking up my sense of the “next.”

Instead of being causality’s passenger— first X happened, then I felt Y way about it —I could unhinge more readily from explication. I could embellish, I could remix, I could make my fish tale bigger and bigger if I chose, until the thing I’d caught (a baby? or had it caught me?) would be, in the retelling, humongous enough to have swallowed the whole hook, line, and sinker of the lexicon I knew.

I see a version of this impulse in Frank O’Hara’s famous Lunch Poems, like the one written upon Jackson Pollock’s death which begins,