Photo: Irish Centre for Poetry Studies.1
A while ago I realized that my experience of thinking is like a paint mixer: sudden and violent. Something a bit more zen might be nice, but it’s like Rummy said: you go to war with the army you got. On reflection, I’m beginning to realize that a whole aesthetics — a poetics, even — flows from that experience: I prefer things that are brilliant and flawed in equal measure. Things that are too fine, too perfect, too consummate are best left to the spectacle: you can gawp at them but you can’t really learn from them. Or, rather, there’s always one last thing you can never learn from them, which is how to do it yourself. But something terrible and fabulous at the same time is a lesson that never ends. This poem seems a bit like that.
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Insta-friendly staged photos of “literary” experience are insufferable. ↩