no things considered

i said some things once. some things about the picture below. i forgot that i said them, and then i remembered.

Outside, there aren’t any trees. There are a lot of buildings that I pretend are trees. Since there are some birds, it’s not that hard. At the end of each hallway, on each floor, there is a window. That’s where I am now. It’s very grimy, the window. Below the window are two stairs and a small amount of concrete I use as a seat. I go to each window on each floor and sit on the piece of concrete. I think about how this place isn’t safe. I still don’t want to leave. I love it here. The place and I are interchangeable. The place takes over and I tell all of the people I can’t leave. I tell them this is where I live and this is my life. They don’t mention it to me that they don’t believe me but I can tell.

this was one time. there were other things then, too.

contemporary poetry

dana gioia: "the debasement of poetic language; the prolixity of the lyric; the bankruptcy of the confessional mode; the inability to establish a meaningful aesthetic for new poetic narrative and the denial of a musical texture in the contemporary poem." from, "notes on the new formalism"

lisa sewell: "innovative, materialist poetic practices have been absorbed by both the lyric mainstream and the multicultural poetries of identity politics: writers on either side of the ostensible divide employ interruption, parataxis, narrative discontinuity, and alinearity to produce fragmentation and disjunction." from, american poets in the 21rst century.

cole swensen: "considering the traits associated with 'conventional' work, such as coherence, linearity, formal clarity, narrative, firm closure, symbolic resonance, and stable voice, and those generally assumed of 'experimental' work, such as non-linearity, juxtaposition, rupture, fragmentation, immanence, multiple perspective, open form, and resistance to closure, hybrid poets access a wealth of tools, each one of which can change dramatically depending on how it is combined with others and the particular role it plays in the composition." from, american hybrid

dear baudrillard,

it seems like this. to me, it seems like this.

what you mean is that presence (simulacra) absorbs absence (simulation).

"'whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms' (littre). therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the 'true' and the 'false,' the 'real' and the imaginary.'"

i also think you think of the phases of an image:

1. it is the reflection of a profound reality; -> 2. it masks and denatures a profound reality; -> 3. it masks the absence of a profound reality; -> 4. it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.

i think in 3, you might mean it makes aware the absence by masking it. and in 4, you must mean that representation is represented, or at least the idea of representation is represented.