Book Of Firsts
In 1948, Claude Shannon theorized that information is not a thing but a “difference,” a signal emerging from uncertainty, a pattern that’s meaningful only once it’s recognized, misrecognized, lost, or found again. A name is a code. A touch is a signal. Meaning lives in the space between sender and receiver.
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Book of Firsts moves along this same frontier, but from within the experience of a mind learning how to read the world. Each poem traces a moment when contact becomes knowledge: the first sensation that stands out from noise, the first desire that returns as a signal, the first mistake when the code fails, the first forgetting and remembering, the first trust in stability, the first grief when the signal is lost.
The voice in Book of Firsts (the “I”), emerges as a liminal consciousness, suspended between human feeling and logic. It is not a single speaker but a shifting, composite presence: part memory, part pattern, capable of intimacy, a narrator who speaks from a perspective that combines human feeling with a diffuse, awareness not tied to a single self.
These poems don’t illustrate Shannon’s information theory, they echo it. They show how awareness forms through transmission, how the world becomes legible one first at a time. They remind us that meaning doesn’t begin with certainty, but with the fragile act of reaching toward something and discovering that it answers…or doesn’t.
The Way of the River: Sijo Poetry in English is a chapbook that features many of my own Sijo poems and resource information on the Sijo form, including classical and contemporary examples. It’s a free download at: 
David K. Jibson 