excerpt from the letter i mentioned before. it probably comes off as pissed off and crazy, but eh. i hope to finish it at some point.
cut and paste, cut and paste. my whole life, would it be more than-.
lightning and foam make a pelican fly
hallo. a poem from the stacks--though, i promised myself i'd abstain from all meta art for a while because. because there are those nights you want to set fire to identity politics, write julia kristeva like a drunk mad person about how her take on proust was irritating (that is, "sex isn't everything," and the idea of perceiving the world as if it was was interesting for maybe two seconds), daydream yourself back to when you could ingest a story on first listen as if believing were possible. and just quit. just quit. it's always one yoke or another, and balancing on swung ropes. if you let yourself see it that way, i guess.
that sounds more bitter than i really feel. just--g'ah! but you probably know better, you probably always knew better.
it's like those piles of reduced-sale iowa writers' workshop memoirs lining the exit of the campus bookstore. thick but lightweight tomes about how lovely it is to eat breakfast with this or that poet or how in this workshop soandso made the most delightfully witty remark and how it felt spiritual and also like summer camp for graceful weathered geniuses. so charming! so puke-inducing. i mean fuck... i can't explain it well enough; i'm just tired of so much merciless clueless brazen public wankery. in any corner really (political circle jerks make me as nauseous as academic ones). i would love to find out that certain great poets were/are actually loners at this point. not because i romanticize loneliness into "setting oneself apart," not anything so sentimental as that anymore, but because artistic community, on a broad scale, seems to very rarely live up to the idea of itself. salons and stein, queer culture and incubating pride from self-professed marginalization, proudly playing the asshole (hemingway), any of it. there must be more than tea cookies and self-important pats on the back, or pettiness to bleed into artistic criticism. fuck this. nothing real gets done.
maybe what pierced the belly of all of this is my trying out anselm hollo. (i dig alice notley as one of those writers who, to me, is ON when she's on. and i set her apart from the schools to which critics link her, in terms of finished product...so anyway.) i tried so many books and it was maybe 60-40 split between iowa-writers'-workshop-wankery disgust (so much name-dropping and meta referencing and nesting iww-self-importance within flimsy disdain--as an aside, i dislike that, when people find they can include an unpopular view within their commentary as if a joke or thin pseudocriticism, or worse yet indifferent "passing along" note, and distance themselves from the consequence of mentioning it by virtue of how they framed it in the first place) and "hm, that almost makes up for its self-congratulatory brevity through yes, sheer cleverness; i'll write this line or two down." liking writing in spite of itself. ah.
cut and paste, cut and paste. my whole life, would it be more than-.
lightning and foam make a pelican fly
hallo. a poem from the stacks--though, i promised myself i'd abstain from all meta art for a while because. because there are those nights you want to set fire to identity politics, write julia kristeva like a drunk mad person about how her take on proust was irritating (that is, "sex isn't everything," and the idea of perceiving the world as if it was was interesting for maybe two seconds), daydream yourself back to when you could ingest a story on first listen as if believing were possible. and just quit. just quit. it's always one yoke or another, and balancing on swung ropes. if you let yourself see it that way, i guess.
that sounds more bitter than i really feel. just--g'ah! but you probably know better, you probably always knew better.
it's like those piles of reduced-sale iowa writers' workshop memoirs lining the exit of the campus bookstore. thick but lightweight tomes about how lovely it is to eat breakfast with this or that poet or how in this workshop soandso made the most delightfully witty remark and how it felt spiritual and also like summer camp for graceful weathered geniuses. so charming! so puke-inducing. i mean fuck... i can't explain it well enough; i'm just tired of so much merciless clueless brazen public wankery. in any corner really (political circle jerks make me as nauseous as academic ones). i would love to find out that certain great poets were/are actually loners at this point. not because i romanticize loneliness into "setting oneself apart," not anything so sentimental as that anymore, but because artistic community, on a broad scale, seems to very rarely live up to the idea of itself. salons and stein, queer culture and incubating pride from self-professed marginalization, proudly playing the asshole (hemingway), any of it. there must be more than tea cookies and self-important pats on the back, or pettiness to bleed into artistic criticism. fuck this. nothing real gets done.
maybe what pierced the belly of all of this is my trying out anselm hollo. (i dig alice notley as one of those writers who, to me, is ON when she's on. and i set her apart from the schools to which critics link her, in terms of finished product...so anyway.) i tried so many books and it was maybe 60-40 split between iowa-writers'-workshop-wankery disgust (so much name-dropping and meta referencing and nesting iww-self-importance within flimsy disdain--as an aside, i dislike that, when people find they can include an unpopular view within their commentary as if a joke or thin pseudocriticism, or worse yet indifferent "passing along" note, and distance themselves from the consequence of mentioning it by virtue of how they framed it in the first place) and "hm, that almost makes up for its self-congratulatory brevity through yes, sheer cleverness; i'll write this line or two down." liking writing in spite of itself. ah.