I don't think of Lousiville, Ky as conductive of poem-writing, but I just wrote one anways; lastnight I read H Vendler on Plath's "Edge," and suspect it inflects what follows, but I think it actually steals a phrase--the cold fold of the calla bit--from another Plath poem:

Longer Than Life

The cold
Fold of the calla

More calisthenics than
Lilly, light

Beam as
Load, lets an

Imagination

Go, transmutes gone to

Gold, filling

In the incisor, its root

Recalling opera, an aria

Mirroring a hearse, as if death

Hears life not

The longer

Note, Life’s inverse and

Essential to maintaining turns.

 

Carmen Gimenez Smith
PARTS OF AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY:

"I want my problems to be Wallace Stevens, but they’re Anne Sexton."

I love the above statement; I feel like I get it, tho I'm not feeling able to articulate why this is the case; I suspect if I tried to, it'd become clear how much I don't get it. 

Maybe I love it because it suggests just how marvelous Stevens' poems are, that even when one wants to dislike him/them, one can't quite, seemingly, get there.  This tho is conjecture, as Gimenez never says she finds his poems amazingly/wonderful, only that Sexton is, apparently, more problematic for her.

Oh, I now feel the quotation is unclearly written: does Smith mean she wants her problems to be those which are consonate with ones Wallace Stevens had, but instead she's stuck with AS's?  Or does she mean she wishes her gripes n grapples are with Wally, but they're with Sexton's?  My confusion stems from whether one is meant to, implicitly, put a "with" in-between "be" and "Wallace."

Nina Power quoting Tiqqun: [Anorexia is] ‘the desire to free oneself from a body entirely colonized by commodity symbolism’.

Couldn't this also be a case of striving to fit the commodity?  To fit into the very public, very visible "sample size"?  Couldn't anorexia suggest there's no space for some figures, so why not become as "not-there" as possible?  Or, scarier, couldn't anorexia suggest one has no right to occupy space?

I like this line, well, portion of a line, from a poem by Seth Oelbaum:

will light ever go green?

Jackie Wang's "Against Innocense" (I'm mispelling I suspect) is awesome!  Terrifying and awesome; and it appears in a journal--or collective publication or whatever the best terms may be: I apologize for forgetting the name--that appears full of urgent, incisive analysis; there is, for me, definitely hope for the world when the world produces, despite all odds, this kind of amazing!  I am grateful.

This is more than less my favorite dress ever; it makes me remember an ad, or perhaps ad serries, from the late 80s; did he do other similar looks, or am I "dreaming"?  Oh poo, this is silk, ain't it?  And forever I've been thinkin' sequins and/or beading!!!!!!!!!!!  I ought to buy this book!  I wish I had a Vogue archive from like 198787 to 1992!

Without A Qualifier, Is The Girl (that trope) Assumed To Be Slim And Pretty?

"The Young-Girl is idle talk substantiated, inauthentic life made Queen: ‘Precisely because of her nothingness, each of her judgements carries the imperative weight of the entire sovereign order, and she knows it.’"  This is from a review by Nina Power who I'd like to assume is not a female in conventional bodily sense of a work titled  Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl by some one or matrix named Tiqqun.  As stated in the blogpost-title, is it just me or may there be some distressing homogenization of girls going on in this theory of the girl.  Maybe it's just me, but when I read the world girl, I think trim and lovely, or at-least conventionally attractive; and it's easy for me to imagine that it's the pretty girls who get to deploy girly power, who indeed get to be the girl; the fat girl is very, very different, I'm guessing, in discourses.  I think the confidence of the pretty ones--women and men and all the gorgeous bends--has yet to recieve adequate attention/theorizing.  Are aesthetically yummy people immune to difficulty--institutional difficulty included--well I'd assume not; but lookin' lovely nonetheless may make, in many instances, for some major advantages when it comes to having an audience or having the sense of nerve to act certain ways.  Ultimately I think this is not surprising--there's no clear reason why feminism should be immune to braiding amicably to capitalist logic/the logic of mainstream media.  I know, discursively, what a girl is; however, the term frequently makes me want to yell the question--and what, in the name of deliciousness (I love delicious as non gustatorial adjective), is a girl?  Too, the word girl, for me, already denotes heterosexuality, and I find that barfy.  Now, for a perhaps absurd torquing of what precedes: I love the word Girl!