Sunday, 30 September 2018


First-person, or autobiographical poetry is strangely effective despite being absurd. Present-tense declarations cast in loosely vatic diction seem to retain a trace of an imperishable discovery of self supporting whatever banal performatives are brought forth to licence the assertion of existence, as if experience conjugates being. That words merely written become a voice through the slightest inflection of form fulfills a possibility that was already inherent in perishable utterance. The stage on which they sound out is one of the earliest and most stable of acquisitions. But even without such a scene lighting and sounding the orator words fit more perfectly than what is imagined. Even if the speaker is not only absent but precisely what is in question the words are shaped to the mind more perfectly than any glove. The words are the shape and the mind is in the words, the words themselves in pure felicity mean no more than themselves and are their own commentary and unfolding. Repeat the words over and over until they decompose into sounds and then see that this takes nothing away from them except what never belonged; it is exactly what is being done.

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