(no subject)

[proximoception]

I think I truly hate Marjorie Perloff, who I've probably read more of in these two classes than all the poets combined. She's actually a very lucid writer, but that enables her to do a lot of damage. I think the lucidity may even be the damage, in a strange way: she thinks that different specific explanations of the specific differences in the ways texts fall are what texts exist to elicit. This is why she's happiest with the texts that make that plain, that get you started with some flowchart of underlined ambiguities. Not ambiguities where you ponder the difference between two possible but not quite appropriate senses until your pondering erodes some new way through that density as the poet intended, but ambiguities where you're off on one and then the other or maybe one each in each brain hemisphere, while screaming "wheeee!" And not for the sake of any of them in particular, but for whatever is proved by their being so many. Which you'd think would be just one thing and therefore eventually tedious. Does she worship that thing? I'd have to read even more to find out and I'm just not gonna.

We don't read more to get more of what it might be, we read more to get more of what it is. And yes, some of what "what it is" is is different things (since this it is never tedious), or can only be phrased uncertainly or as though, but it's specific different uncertain as though things, not just any old things that happen to be different. I wonder what's wrong with her that she doesn't know this? Her career?

Well, obviously it's the old demon you-must-be-wrong-because-otherwise-how-can-I-be-right, and its riding a victim explorer into branches of the cave no one would ever glance at if they weren't the most easily reached of those as yet (seemingly) unentered. Which may be active in me tonight, who knows.