Saturday, February 10, 2007

Why I Write

1

I write because I would like to live forever. The fact of my future death offends me. That the people and things I love will die wounds me as well. I seek to immortalize the world I have found and made for myself, even knowing that I won’t be there to witness that immortality, mine or its, that by definition I will never know whether my endeavor has been successful. But when has impossibility ever deterred anyone from a goal? As Alvin Feinman once said to me, “Poetry is always close kin to the impossible, isn’t it?”

My aim is to rescue some portion of the drowned and drowning, including always myself. For a long time my poetry emerged from and was fueled by an impulse to rescue my mother from her own death and from the wreckage of her life, out of which I emerged, in both senses of the word. That wreckage made me who I am, but also I escaped that wreckage, which she, by dying, did not. So I had a certain survivor guilt toward the person who both made my escape possible and represented that from which I had escaped. Many of the poems in my first book, Some Are Drowning, centered around an absent, speechless other, an inaccessible beloved who frequently stood in for my mother, though she’s an explicit presence in very few of my poems. But her absence was always palpable, a ghostly presence haunting the text. My poems were an attempt to speak to her, to get her to speak back to me, and above all to redeem her suffering: that is, to redeem her life. “Danger invites/rescue--I call it loving,” as James Tate wrote in his early poem "Rescue." That project is over, not completed but abandoned (as Paul Valéry said all poems are), but the attempt to rescue my mother through poetry was a major motivation for many years.

The possibility of suffering being redeemed by art, being made meaningful and thus real (as opposed to merely actual, something that happens to exist, happens to occur), is still vital to me. Art reminds us of the uniqueness, particularity, and intrinsic value of things, including ourselves. I sometimes have little sense of myself as existing in the world in any significant way outside of my poetry. That’s where my real life is, the only life that’s actually mine. So there’s also the wish to rescue myself from my own quotidian existence, which is me but is at the same time not me at all. I am its, but it’s not mine. For most of us most of the time, life is a succession of empty moments. You’re born, you go through x experiences, you die, and then you’re gone. No one always burns with Pater’s hard, gem-like flame. There’s a certain emptiness to existence that I look to poetry, my own poetry and the poetry of others, to fulfill or transcend. I have a strong sense of things going out of existence at every second, fading away at the very moment of their coming into bloom: in the midst of life we are in death, as the Book of Common Prayer puts it.

In that sense everyone is drowning, everything is drowning, every moment of living is a moment of drowning. I have a strong sense of the fragility of the things we shore up against the ruin which is life: the fragility of natural beauty but also of artistic beauty, which is meant to arrest death, but embodies death in that very arrest. Goethe’s Faust is damned when he says, “Oh moment, stay.” At last he finds a moment he longs to preserve, but the moment dissipates when it’s halted. The moment is defined by its transience; to fix it is to kill it. Art is a simulacrum of life that embodies and operates by means of death. The aesthetic impulse is the enemy of the lived moment at the same time that it attempts both to preserve and to transcend that moment. This is the inescapable aporia of art. “One has to be downright naive to think that art can restore to the world the fragrance it has lost, according to a line by Baudelaire” (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory 59). Art itself is so vulnerable, to time, to indifference, especially in a society like ours that cares nothing for the potentials art offers, that if anything seeks to repress them in the name of profit or proper order. I have an intense desire to rescue these things that have touched me and place them somewhere for safekeeping, which is both impossible and utterly necessary.

What we take out of life is the luminous moment, which can be a bare branch against a morning sky so overcast it’s in whiteface, seen through a window that warps the view because the glass has begun to melt with age. Or it can be the face of a beautiful man seen in passing on a crowded street, because beauty is always passing, and you see it but it doesn’t see you. It’s the promise that beauty is possible and the threat that it’s only momentary: if someone doesn’t write it down it’s gone. The moment vanishes without a trace and then the person who experiences that moment vanishes and then there’s nothing. Except perhaps the poem, which can’t change anything. As Auden said, poetry makes nothing happen, which also implies the possibility of making “nothing” an event rather than a mere vacancy. Poetry rescues nothing and no one, but it embodies that helpless, necessary will to rescue, which is a kind of love, my love for the world and the things and people in the world.

2

I write not to be bored. I hate being bored, and I don’t want to bore others. Unlike Zelda Fitzgerald, I can’t say that I’m never bored because I’m never boring. I am often bored, and undoubtedly I am sometimes boring. But I try not to be boring in poems, and in turn I don’t want poems to bore me. Poems should be interesting, should engage and hold the interest. The most basic level of interest is the sensual, the aural, the texture and feel of words and phrases: the poem in the ear, the poem in the mouth. Helen Vendler has called the poem a musical composition scored for the human voice. The poem is a palpable sensuous entity or it is nothing.

What is it that I seek when I read a poem, when I write a poem? Above all, I desire an experience, a mode of experience available to me only through poetry. “The reading of a poem should be an experience [like experiencing an act]. Its writing must be all the more so” (Stevens, “Adagia,” Collected Poetry and Prose 905, 909). A true poetic experience is worth more than a thousand oppositional critiques, most of which tend to be rather predictable in any case.

My interest can be defined by at least part of Charles Reznikoff’s characterization of his poetry: “images clear but the meaning not stated but suggested by the objective details and the music of the verse.” As a reader, I look for such clarity of image and phrase, for a rhythmic pulse and a rich verbal texture, for a sense of shape and coherence even in the midst of apparent fracture. As a writer, I try to provide these things. But an overall “meaning” or “interpretation” isn’t the first or the main thing I seek, as either reader or writer. “A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have one” (Stevens, “Adagia,” CPP 914). Attend to the senses and sense will often attend to itself.

I respond to urgency, to a sense of felt necessity, to passion. The word passion derives from the Greek for “suffering, experience, emotion.” The word itself summons up the poem as an experience undergone by the writer and the reader alike. Passion is not just a passion for my lover or for botany or for history, but a passion for words, a passionate struggle to try to create verbal experience that would be as real as the rest of the world. “In poetry, you must love the words, the ideas and images and rhythms with all your capacity to love anything at all” (Stevens, “Adagia,” CPP 902). Like any object of love, that also means that the poem will resist its creator, just as the world resists us. The struggle such passion entails is both joyous and painful. “Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully” (op. cit., 910). Of course, that presumes both an intelligence to be resisted and an intelligence that resists. The poet, the poem, and the reader must all be as intelligent as possible.

I desire variety in my poems and the poems of others because the expansion of my poetic territories is the expansion of my world. The poem expands the world as I find it, it makes more world available to me. Works of art are (or should be) like people: no person is new, but every person is unique. To encounter a work of art is to enter into a new relationship, with the work and with the world to which it is an addition.

If art really is some kind of compensation or restitution for what we lack in our lives, and I believe that among many other things it is, it can be so only by providing something different from what we already have, not merely by reflecting or reflecting upon those lives and those myriad lacks.

I want to write good poems (and I still believe that there is such a thing, that aesthetic judgment is not merely a mystification), but not the same good poems that I’ve already written. I’d like to do what I haven’t done before. This has proven to be an impediment to my poetic reputation: I don’t have a trademark style that I repeat from book to book, I haven’t commodified myself and my work into a brand. Critic Vernon Shetley describes the contemporary American poetry world “where each poet seems compelled to enhance his or her brand recognition with an easily recognizable gimmick” (“America’s Big Heart,” Metre 10, 79). A reader too often knows exactly what he or she is getting, whether from a “mainstream” poet or an “avant-garde” one. Arthur C. Danto concurs that “There is an overwhelming tendency in America to brand artists, so that the well informed can identify an example of an artist’s work in a single act of instant recognition” (“Surface Appeal,” The Nation, 1/29/07, 33). Not to so brand or trademark one’s work puts one at a distinct disadvantage.

To attempt something new and fail is much more interesting than to attempt something that’s already been done and fail. I don’t want to write something just because I know I can, just to reaffirm what I already know. Of course, to say that I don’t want to do the same thing twice is to assume that I’ve done something in the first place. I not only don’t know what I can do, I don’t know what I’ve done. How could one, not having access to the vantage point of posterity? With every poem I’m trying to do something that I can’t achieve, to get somewhere I’ll never get. If I were able to do it, if I were able to get there, I’d have no reason to continue writing. As Allen Grossman suggests, poetry aims at the end of poetry, which is unattainable (the ends of poetry are the end of poetry). Thus poetry continues, despite the frequent reports of its death.

I would like my poetry to bring into existence something which did not previously exist, including in my mind or my intention. I want to surprise myself, to do something I didn’t plan to do or even that’s not immediately recognizable to me as something I did. (Though Donald Morrill, on a panel we were recently both on about difficulty in poetry, reminded me that not all surprises are good.) For the writer as well as for the reader, poetry should shake one out of one’s habitual ways of seeing and thinking, conceiving and perceiving. As Hemingway said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the writer “should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed.” The goal is to achieve the higher level of “mastery” that permits the medium to do things of its own accord, out of its own internal logic, in which the writer participates but which the writer doesn’t determine.

I think of the poem the way that I think of a painting or a sculpture: a new entity in the world, not just a comment on the world. While meaning is hardly insignificant, it’s not what defines the poem as a poem. I seek out the specificity of the poem as an event in language (“language as the material of poetry, not its mere medium or instrument,” in Stevens’s formulation), and not a recounting or re-enactment of an extra-linguistic event, though of course such events enter into poems. The poem is not hermetically sealed off from the world, but encounters and engages the world as an independent element.

The forms that these things which have not previously existed, these events that have not previously occurred, take are not predetermined. If one is sufficiently lucky and open to possibility, they can be found, they will happen, in the villanelle as well as in the most self-consciously avant-garde poem. Among others, Karen Volkman demonstrates the continuing vitality of the sonnet as a field of exploration and experimentation. As Wallace Stevens wrote in his “Materia Poetica, “All poetry is experimental poetry” (CPP 918). To maintain and expand the formal capacities of the medium is also to conserve and preserve those capacities. As Susan Stewart has written, “the disappearance of any aesthetic form from human memory is a disaster not unlike the extinction of a species, since a realm of possible actions is now precluded and not necessarily provided with a compensatory analogue” (“The State of Cultural Theory and the Future of Literary Form,” Profession 93, edited by Phyllis Franklin).

As many poets have done, I look back, to the High Modernists and to the poets of the English Renaissance, to move forward. Eliot looked back to the English Metaphysical poets and the Jacobean dramatists, Pound looked back to Sappho and Catullus and to the Provençal troubadours, Stevens looked back to what M.H. Abrams calls the major Romantic lyric, and Celan looked back to medieval German mysticism and the Hebrew Bible. Zukofsky’s anti-capitalist A 9 is modeled after Guido Cavalcanti’s canzone “Donna Mi Prega” (a poem highly recommended by Pound in his ABC of Reading).

Thus I prefer words like “distinctive,” “different,” or “unique” to a word like “new,” with all its connotations of novelty and fashion, of doing the not-yet-done for its own sake. Or perhaps, even better, the word “original,” which means both “of the first instance” and “of the origin, of the source.” To be original is at once to produce something which has never before existed and to draw on the beginnings of one’s practice, to move forward by casting back.

I don’t write a poem and ask, “Is this new?” I ask, “Is this individual, distinctive, unique?” Of course, for a poem to be completely unique, for it to have no relationship to anything that’s come before, would be for it not to be a poem at all. As would be the case for the completely new poem.

I’ve written before that forms, styles, modes, genres, do not have intrinsic meanings or values. A self-consciously avant-garde poem can be as rote as the most bland pseudo-autobiographical anecdote, if its writing is not approached in a true spirit of adventuring into possibility. Simply to seek the new for its own sake is a shallow and pointless affair, like chasing after the latest fashions. As Talk Talk sang, mocking such a dedicated follower of fashion “She’ll wear anything you can’t recognize.” And too often, of course, one does recognize it.

One is always setting out in search of the new, as Baudelaire wrote, seeking out what does not yet exist. But I would rather write a good poem than a new poem. And many of the varieties of “the new” now on offer seem rather worn and agèd at this point. Rimbaud wrote that it is necessary to be as modern as possible; as if in reply, Wallace Stevens wrote that “One cannot spend one’s time in being modern when there are so many more important things to be” (“Adagia,” CPP 912).

Of course, Stevens also wrote that “Newness (not novelty) may be the highest individual value in poetry. Even in the meretricious sense of newness a new poem has value” (“Adagia,” CPP 914). Too many poets confuse novelty with genuine newness. “The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover” (Stevens, “Materia Poetica,” CPP 919). This is a fault shared by too much of the contemporary American poetic avant-garde: it is filled with entirely too many accordion-playing clams, and the clams rarely play well.

3

Any artistic medium calls forth into being a self and a world which exist specifically in their relationship to that medium, a self which did not exist prior to that engagement. As Yeats wrote, the self who writes is not the self who sits down to dinner or reads the evening paper. Contrary to Mikhail Bakhtin’s assertion that the lyric is monologic (as opposed to the novel’s “dialogized heteroglossia”), the lyric problematizes and decenters the univocal speaking subject. The self in the most determinedly confessional poem is still a mask, a construct. Eliot writes that “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes” (“The Metaphysical Poets,” Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode, 64). Eliot’s statement needs to be amended to acknowledge that such a perfectly receptive state (for it is receptivity and attention of which he is writing) is always an asymptote, striven for but never achieved, and that the poet’s mundane experience as an ordinary individual is no less chaotic, irregular, and fragmentary than anyone else’s. The difference is what one makes of those fragments, what and what kind of order, however tenuous and contingent, one brings to that chaos.

I would like each poem of mine to be as close to perfection (an impossible goal) as possible, and I think that good poems are much more rare than some account them to be. I would also like my work to be more than just an accumulation of good poems, as hard as even a single good poem is to achieve. I would like the whole to add up to more than the sum of its parts. Eliot said that this is one test of a major poet (his example was George Herbert): “a major poet is one the whole of whose work we ought to read, in order fully to appreciate any part of it” (“What Is Minor Poetry?,” On Poetry and Poets 44). Each individual part illuminates and is illuminated by both every other part and the corpus as a whole. To produce such a body of work is one of my goals as a writer.

4

And never to forget beauty, however strange or difficult.

11 comments:

hideindisguise said...

hey...u write really well and since you are an established writer, would like to know..how does one know that one is a writer?

Unknown said...

Ces vérités, ne forment-ils pas chaque poèt? N'existent-ils pas dans chaque poèt?

Lee Herrick said...

this is fantastic, reginald. i'm enjoying your blog as i've enjoyed your poems.

Blogaulaire said...

Reginald Shepherd -- excellent quotable prose and an essay I will 'blog' somewhere. Sylvie: je crois que non, pour chaque poèt il peut exister d'autres vérités, pas nécessairement ceux-la.

I do have a difficulty. Not with the clams playing whatever. I agree there about shallow surrealist imagery.

My difficulty is with the implication that there is high versus low art. I really do not care whether a poet knows his or her Shakespeare, his or her Moliere or the tradition of No theatre. I think also that Ezra Pound was at his best when he left aside his intellectualism and the esoteric side of his discoveries.

Your own relation to poetry is, as you stress, key and you are moving in the manner you write about it. But I am not even certain that I agree entirely that the best poetry is a fruit of such serious and probing introspection.

Imagine a poem that includes the words, say, 'keystroke', 'plasma screen' and 'psychotropic'. Day by day I'm becoming convinced that the high modernists are allergic to a poetics that draws on word choices drawn directly from the world we live in today.

Increasingly I eschew an esthetic that elevates such discriminatory excisions from its vocabulary to a system.

I also think laughter can be poetic.

Oh, by the way, I put your blog on my list of links on my blog.

Mark Granier said...

"I write because I would like to live forever."

Of course, though I am sensible (as you are) to Time's winged subway shuddering near. I may have the dread even worse than you; I can't help, when I think of the frailty of art/beauty/Truth etc. thinking how insubstantial even the most generous attempt at preservation is, and at how the whole world (globally overheated or not) is going, sooner or later, to be blasted by the sun's plush spread to extinction, then even the cinder pummeled by galactic logrollings. As Mark Doty noted in a very funny poem about preparing for an aircraft crash-landing, what good would the world be if he wouldn't be around to see it? Call me a pessimistic agnostic; I try to hedge my bets. But my gut tells me that when I die so does everything (and I suspect most peoples' guts feel the same). Your wonderful art, even if it's as wonderful as you hope and pray, won't really survive that long in the scheme of things. Anyway, I think time vanishes when we pop out of existence. So, following in the geological blip of mere centuries or millennia, our art will go where we're going, back to our rented apartments in Nothingville, with their incomparable view of the end of the universe, eye to eye with the sinkhole of oblivion. And yet, and yet.

I also have "an intense desire to rescue these things that have touched me and place them somewhere for safekeeping, which is both impossible and utterly necessary." Or I have the desire anyway, sometimes intense, sometimes less than intense. I am wary of making those great claims for poetry/art. I see you are wary too, yet you go ahead and make them. Sure, poetry may be a gathering in of the loved people/moments etc., a big, creaking Ark for the saved or almost saved or saved in essence. But that can seem too futile, too much like holding up a sunshade to ward off an approaching Black Hole. I think every good poem is a kind of elevated protest at nullity, at what Mailer mused that God might, after all, be: a billion miles of styrofoam. Milosz put it beautifully in his poem 'Meaning', which begins with the line: "When I die, I will see the lining of the world." But the poem goes on to acknowledge the doubt: "And if there is no lining to the world? / If a thrush on a branch is not a sign, / But just a thrush on the branch?"... Even if that's how it is, there will be "A tireless messenger who runs and runs / Through interstellar fields,/ through the revolving galaxies, / And calls out, protests, screams." That's also what poems are: tireless messengers whose message is an eloquent scream (or belly-laugh).

In this sense if no other, good poems are ALWAYS political. Larkin’s magnificent ‘Aubade’ (his “in-a-funk-about-death poem”) which Milosz, in an uncharacteristically weak poem, objected to, is as much an eloquent scream against the void as anything Milosz wrote.

"My aim is to rescue some portion of the drowned and drowning, including always myself."

Not waving then, I guess. Too busy throwing lifebelts. Careful though, they may be mistaken for wreathes.

"For most of us most of the time, life is a succession of empty moments."

Ah, but as Woody Allen said about sex (sans love), "as empty experiences go it's one of the best." Your definition is a bit sweeping Reginald, a tad high-handed. Reminds me of the time I was door-stopped by a couple of sharp-dressed Mormons who asked me if I believed in God, then, when I said I didn't, inquired what gave my life meaning; at which point I had an inspiration and answered "getting out of bed if its sunny and sleeping in if it isn't." Sure, the eureka moments, moments of aesthetic euphoria, the big epiphanies, are pretty thin on the ground. But what about the common or garden epiphany? What about waking up and smelling the coffee (as olfactory blessing rather than smart-arsed cliché). Hell, what about dumping the flea-bitten Existential Pussy Cat out the back door where it belongs and snuggling down with your partner to watch a good episode of 'Frasier' or 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'?

"My interest can be defined by at least part of Charles Reznikoff’s characterization of his poetry: “images clear but the meaning not stated but suggested by the objective details and the music of the verse.” "

Yes, strong images, "the thing itself" and the music of the verse are where it's at, I think.

"As a writer, I try to provide these things. But an overall “meaning” or “interpretation” isn’t the first or the main thing I seek, as either reader or writer. “A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have one” (Stevens, “Adagia,” CPP 914). Attend to the senses and sense will often attend to itself."

Some of this, such as the last sentence, I agree with wholeheartedly. But beside your epigram from Stevens (who after all said that "there is no wing like meaning") I would place your earlier quote from Reznikoff about the music of the verse, and add that the meaning may be embodied by the music.

"Eliot said that this is one test of a major poet: “a major poet is one the whole of whose work we ought to read, in order fully to appreciate any part of it”. Each individual part illuminates and is illuminated by both every other part and the corpus as a whole. To produce such a body of work is one of my goals as a writer."

Again, this obsession with being a 'major' writer (reminds me of that character in 'Catch 22': Major Major Major Major). You brought it up before in relation to writing the long (major) poem; there are many reasons for writing a long poem, but wanting to be a major poet strikes me as being about the worst reason in the world. I dislike this major/minor thing, and it seems rather presumptuous too. Fenton thought it was high time that a good (or great) single poem garnered a little more respect. I agree. Screw the oeuvre. How can you really tell which poems or poets are destined to be remembered as major or minor? Personally, Pound's major poetry (e.g. The Cantos) seems disastrously overblown to me. But his little imagist poems are gems; the latter may well be fitter to continue the good work (like those 'Songs' he wrote of) long after people have dismissed or forgotten the Big Stuff. Same with Auden. His exquisite 'Musee Des Beaux Arts' has, for me, far greater weight and scope than many of his more ambitious poems.

Mailer suffers from this major/minor worry in a major way, as do many American writers, or so it seems to me. Maybe being Big is a bigger thing over there. I've talked to a fair few poets here, and none of them, as far as I recall, has ever even broached the subject; perhaps they're all secretly obsessed with it but scared of being laughed at. Who knows?

Reginald Shepherd said...

Dear Blogaulaire,

Thanks for reading and for your generous words.

I would say a few things in response to your comment. First, there is such a thing as high art and there is such a thing as low art. One can argue about their relative value, but they exist in the world and can't simply be wished away.

Second, I do very much care whether a poet knows his Shakespeare, etc., and you obviously care enough to know about these things. I think that one can and should choose one's own relation to the tradition, or traditions (there's not just one). But one can only do that knowing the traditions. There's no escaping influence; as John Ashbery said once, not reading just means that you'll be influenced by things you don't know. It also means you'll be more susceptible to the influence of things just floating around in the cultural atmosphere. It's crucial to know the traditions of one's art so that one can make an informed decision about what kind of relationship one wants to have with those traditions, of what is of use or not of use. I think that there's a lot of use there. And certainly knowing Shakespeare doesn't preclude knowing words or phrases like "keystroke" or "psychotropic." It's odd to me that you would think that it does, or that knowing and making use of literary traditions and literary history as a writer is equivalent to making "disciminatory excisions." It's about expanding one's available range of discourse, not constricting it. Shakespeare wrote in the language of his time, and in his own idiosyncratic idiolect. He used all that he knew in his art, and the contemporary writer should do the same. Shakespeare is among the things that we know, or should know. But it's simply wrong (as in, incorrect) to say that knowing and making use of the past is to reject the present. The past is part of the present, part of what has made the present what it is. And it's somewhat disturbing to me for someone who obviously does know Shakespeare and Moliere to say that someone else shouldn't or needn't know them.

How do Shakespeare or Moliere (who did after all write comedies) exclude laughter?

Take good care, and thanks again for reading.

Reginald

Reginald Shepherd said...

Dear Anisha,

Thanks for your kind words. In answer to your question, I would say on the one hand that one never knows when and whether one is a writer. How would one define that happy state and when one had arrived there? Is it when one has written a body of work? Is it when one has published substantially? What are the criteria? I would also say on the other hand that one knows one is a writer when one has made the commitment to be a writer, which is to say, to actually write (writing is an activity, not a state of being), to read as much as one can, to put oneself in the context of the best that's been thought and said, to try to live up to that in one's writing while also adding something to it, and to see where one's own work stands in relation to the work that one admires and that has inspired one.

I hope that this is helpful. Thanks for reading.

Reginald

John Gallaher said...

What a wonderful tonic this morning. Consider this another vote for living forever.

Natch.

Blogaulaire said...

You and I probably agree on some ideal education for the poet, for writers. But for me, once a writer is in print, any question regarding the person's education becomes totally moot. I face that person as a reader. And as a reader, I'm usually seated on my sofa, far removed from my reference books (such as "Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia". Are you saying I should keep 'Benet's' by my side? But sometimes as I read I am on a city bus, travelling between Métros. Should I read High Fiction on the bus and Low Fiction seated next to my collection of books?

Another comment in what is growing toward a thread picked up on the issue of Pounds oeuvre in relation to the major/minor poet/poem preoccupation. I agree with my own and his response to your post on this score.

What I can add is that although I agree with you basically that the writer and the work rescues things from obliteration from time, I enjoy writing that spontaneously evokes the existence of these 'things' by releasing them from a culture's and a civilisation's frame.

The terms 'keystroke', 'plasma screen' and 'psychotropic' are all so firmly anchored in contemporary cultures of disembodied consumerism and spectatorism and technology (unlike the terms 'blade', 'fish bait' and 'birch') that feel compelled if using the former in a text to play with them as the terms are used without reference to your or my literary predecessors.

You provide so much to think about in your post I must state that there is no way I will pretend that my comments can do your text justice here.

Toluwalope said...

"That wreckage made me who I am, but also I escaped that wreckage, which she, by dying, did not."

Perhaps you are wrong. Perhaps she escaped the wreckage - by dying. The only way out, is the way THROUGH...

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