The Goldberg Variations takes as its organizing principle the idea of contingency – the world thrown into Being that the poet encounters – and variation, or Bach’s looping, recombinant system, as a way to turn into verse what shows up in the Notes app – with all the affordances of certain line lengths, the overheard, pop culture, jargon, slang and invective, tree talk, the political and the beautiful, and organizes that raw material, that “language”, into the building blocks of the poem – sonnets and columns, words big and small, short and long, the clusterfuck of 2020 and before and since, desire and lack and maybe luck, good or bad.