what he said

"And when I say that I like poetry I don’t understand I don’t necessarily mean dadaist odes or jumbles of Zaum – it can seem like perfectly normal text at a first glance. But it’ll contain something that’s a little off. Something jilted or tilted or tainted. A shade of imbalance.

What this boils down to is a dimension of understanding or feeling (or whatever) which I can only recognize as religious – a belief or faith which prompts the reader (or writer) to jump the gap to join the poem on the other side."

-Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl, So is the Wasteland

maudlin

"Rather than employ the normative sentence for communicative or representational ends, Stein inhabits the sentence as a compositional field in which the mechanisms of language and of the sentence itself are subject to minute examination and are thus revitalized as immediate and originary acts."

Apparently I wrote that, and about a hundred pages of sentences like that, almost 10 years ago. I barely remember any of the writing, can't even recognize my style in it, stilted and constrained as it is by fear. I like to revisit it every now and then, when it pops up on my vanity google searches, although each time it's more distant from me, less plausible somehow. What I do remember are the sprawling days on the 10th floor of the library, reading through the entire Gertrude Stein section, which took up several shelves, of which I read or at least skimmed every single book. As a research strategy, it was utterly absurd, but what a pleasurable use of time, and how fortunate to feel that I had time, what felt like endless time, to devote to such a methodical approach. How privileged to indulge in such futility. If I have any regret, it's that I did my Master's when I was way too young to appreciate how lucky I was and way too insecure to enjoy it as much as I could have.