Slashes between Polarities

hair / feathers

cunt / dick

animal / plant

ears / skin tags

money / stamps

male / mail

power / outage

mountain / plane

bird / brain

head / egg

rebel / yank

mercy / war

shit / pot

fog / lighthouse

box wine / chateaubriand

come alive / cop it

broke / flush

green / polluted

sword / trowel

sudoku / anal sex

socks / mittens

hoof / nail

sink / toilet

shit / chocolate

crab / stroke

galley / head

oar / wand

bean / brawn

sincere / camp

academic / savant

bread / art


idealists still believe in progress — realists believe in local change

gardens attract animals — armadillos, birds, cats, foxes, insects, rabbits, toads

from Chain #1:

Johanna Drucker: women play the same games as the men once in power

Kathleen Fraser: Our hearts did not belong to Daddy. . . . we preferred to be surprised and pulled into linguistic maps that clearly connected us up to sudden locations of self knowledge & recognition of intellectual/ spiritual/ esthetic zones we might otherwise never have inhabited.

Sigmund Freud: The mechanism of poetry is the same as that of hysterical phantasies.

Elliot George Mishler: [The physician] responds to one element of the patient's account, usually her mention of a specific symptom, abstracts it from the context in which it is presented, and then refers to the symptom within another context expressed in the voice of medicine. The symptom is thus transformed by being relocated to a different province of meaning . . . much is lost in the translation from one voice to another. It is as if a poem in one language that uses qualities of the weather, such as its dampness or coldness, as a metaphor for the feeling state of the narrator were to be translated literally into another language as a description of the weather. . . . Although two persons are talking to each other in the medical interview, it does not have the essential reciprocity feature of ordinary face- to-face interaction and rnight more precisely be viewed as face -to-mask interaction.

Barbara Henning: One man to the next: She's difficult at times, but we'll mold her.

Speaking of Which

Speaking to an Argentine man

is equivalent to interviewing

the person who invented the box

works only inside the box

cannot hear the words of someone

outside the box no matter how

informedly, how articulately

how insistently she speaks.

from Marisa Crawford's essay on Thelma & Louise in delirious hem:

In Thelma & Louise, adult female friendship is a rock-solid and ecstatic alternative to female subjugation and the traditional romance plot. A joyful, vibrating vehicle through which one can achieve true freedom and meaningful self-expression. Until that vehicle drives itself off a cliff.

If men didn’t rape, Louise wouldn’t have shot the rapist. If the system didn’t blame rape victims, they wouldn’t have gone on the run. If men didn’t rape, they could have driven through Texas. If the system didn’t blame rape victims, Louise wouldn’t have been so afraid. If women weren’t taught they deserve to be treated like shit, they wouldn’t have had to become fugitives in order to feel free. If there was a place for liberated, powerful women who live on their own terms in this world, they wouldn’t have had to create their own. If there was a place for liberated, powerful women who live on their own terms in this world, they wouldn’t have had to plummet into the Grand Canyon in order to feel free.

The logic falls in on itself. Like a sea-foam T-bird falling into the Grand Canyon.

Green Tara [pic courtesy of Michelle Myhre]

from Alice Notley's Culture of One (Penguin, 2012):

Identity of a Mist

This codex is about identity. I can’t help it.

What do you really think you have to do? Tara’s

identity is so fixed she has no sense of self. Or beauty,

but I hear the buzzing and humming of letters, she says.

Different, over and over, where the vines trip up

false magicians. I cannot be debunked; grey as the edges

          of creepy awards.

I’m still trying to remember where the heartlessness of

care came from. I engulf the elementary school

in a cloud, so the children can finally branch out. Not

be set towards a terminus of skittering chances, dry

gale — you’re supposed to be bored and superstitious. If you’re

self-destructive, I say that’s better. Though you shouldn’t

die. I’d teach them to respect the gutter and the gully.

The old fathers have to enter the story at some point;

owning all the diamonds, still; coughing them up for

the cruel girls. What’re you gonna do with your

jewel? Smear it with snatch juice and love it to death;

see if I care. It’s a special kind of life, there in civilization.

But on the outer fringes you can probably lose your contempt.

So many shared views: I feel like Alice Notley's channeling me.