Even in Arcadia Am I @miriam@octodon.social

An aside: a student brought a poem to workshop last night that was brilliant--a dictionary rewrite in the vein of A. Van Jordan's in M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, & in the middle of a lovely poem was a line so coarse, so crude, it was frankly shocking. I spent ten minutes thinking about it--did it belong there, or was it *too* crude for the poem? In the end I decided it'd earned its place, and majestically. But either way, to reconfigure your reader's expectations so dramatically, it's a brilliant success.

5/ But in using language itself--in syntax, the way sentences are made, with metaphor--to disassemble the expectations of ordinary life and reconfigure the world anew to us, anew to everyone we engage with. Sometimes it's confounding. (Occasionally I baffle strangers--which I suspect is my ordinary fate.) But any time we're forced to stop and think about language itself, I count that as--what would you call it? An intervention in the ordinary?

4/ Not (just) in using language to repudiate a rhetorical culture in which the responsibility to truth has been erased, in which storytelling itself has become willfully perverse at all levels of society.

3/ Not (just) in the sense of using language to create beauty whether as poets or fiction writers or anyone with a keen and careful gaze.

2/ Not (just) in the power of rhetoric, of constructing persuasive arguments that themselves are both ethical and just, and that advance ways of engaging with the world that are ethical and just.

1/ This dovetails with another set of ideas I'm slowly turning into an essay, maybe. Which is that one of the few powers we as individual citizens have in terms of reconfiguring our world is language itself.

In spite of how quiet Mastodon is, I think that's something that can work in its favor. What if it was able to replicate the most delicious parts of the early internet? Specifically the parts focused on creating not content but deeper connections, and not with thousands but with a small handful that became one another's community? (And by "what if it was able to replicate," I mean "what if *we* were," since the joy of Mastodon's quietness is, to some degree, in the possibilities that promises.

Things I was not accustomed to before living in equatorial Asia: lizard poop in my shoes.

This week's poem-investigations: these gorgeously harrowing fieldwork-derived interview poems from Seam, by Tarfia Faizullah, which tell the stories of Birangona, women raped by Pakistani soldiers during Bangladesh's War of Liberation. But don't let a low appetite for stories of abjection (orange yam in office, etc) scare you away; on a line level, from a craft perspective, they're stunning (and great for thinking through fieldwork in the humanities): https://blog.elizabethdherman.com/2011/12/16/the-legacy-40-years/ #poetry #poems

Did a close read of this genius poem, "Chino," by Brandon Som, with the students in my documentary poetics class last week and the multilingual layering blew their (and my) minds: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/142869/chino

I sent Roxane Gay a birthday note and she wrote me back. Be still my fluttering heart, though her email was a single sentence. I understand why my better-heeled aunts told me sending gracious notes was important.

@joshmillard Yes absolutely and yet somehow I cannot help but love this Mekons cover of "You Wear It Well." How, how? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJd85x773lA

Current favorite eerie illustrators: Tin Can Forest, two Canadian occultist artists: http://tincanforest.com/gallery/ .

Bah, why can't I edit posts! The human eggs that grow in the neck-wrinkles of the she-wolf, of course, like a row of dog ticks!

If you'd written a gloriously grotesque misandrist fable about the origin of humankind, complete with dusty streets through a shanty village, the human eggs that grow from semen leaked out of a sex worker who rides astride a she-wolf, and the ritual disemboweling of children playing keepaway with their own removable genitals, who would your dream illustrator be? Asking for a friend, natürlich.

@nangar Thanks so much for that fantastic explanation + context!

@selfnoise I think the tricky problem here is it's the infinitive; the verb that takes the tense is "forced." (I did actually take a semester-long class on teaching grammar to ESL students not even a year ago, but my brain couldn't help but treat it as a series of logic puzzles to be solved and forgotten. This past decade I've felt like my ability to forget has been the skill I've honed most.)

@scottschuman What a great resource that site is!

A grammar question I'm sheepish to ask: can the word 'submit' be used as is in present and past tense? Or does the past tense *have* to be submitted?