So I went a little meta here, and a little referential. I’m not sure if you need to pick up on the actual references to “get it” (if you think so, please let me know). I wanted to take on another author’s text and incorporate its aesthetic as a kind of pallet, here, to use in exploring complications in readership and authorship. …Er? What this means is that I’m going to nervously over-explain myself here. Off I go.

Voltairine de Cleyre [link] was an American anarchist, feminist, and essayist. In her numerous texts on anarchism, she deals a lot with an isolated sense of self (isolated in the sense that a self is not inherently perceptible or accessible to anyone else). A lot of the imagery here comes from a section of her writing that explores this idea exactly, from her essay, “Anarchism.” It goes like this:

“Once and forever to realize that one is not a bundle of well-regulated little reasons bound up in the front room of the brain to be sermoinzed and held in order with copy-book maxims or moved and stopped by a syllogism, but a bottomless, bottomless depth of all strange sensations, a rocking sea of feeling wherever sweep strong storms of unaccountable hate and rage, invisible contortions of disappointment, low ebbs of meanness, quakings and shudderings of love that drives to madness and will not be controlled, hungerings and moanings and sobbing that smite upon the inner ear, now first bent to listen, as if all the sadness of the sea and the wailing of the great pine forests of the North had met to weep together there in that silence audible to you alone.”

For some of the other imagery: she goes on to say that, having encountered this “depth,” having acknowledged it in ourselves, we are obligated to acknowledge it also in others – in terms of her imagery, it is seeing it in the “fellow” sitting across from her in a “street-car.” Also, in terms of the marriage parenthetical, Voltairine hated, hated, hated marriage. She called it “sex slavery.” No big deal. For the whole gun shots and accusations bit, Voltairine was shot at point-blank range by someone intending to assassinate her, but she survived and, holding to her anarchical principles, refused to testify against or accuse him. No bigger deal. Much of the other images (crab legs, Earth, sun) are just my wonky contributions.

Okay. So there’s an excessive amount of information for you. I’m hoping the poem carries without the need for all of that, but I’ll leave that to you. I’ve lost a bit of objectivity here (too much reading!), which I guess is weirdly appropriate, considering. And so, as always but maybe particularly in the case, I’d love to hear your thoughts. (:

Also, I think I should completely mess the form up in this one. These couplets aren’t appropriate. Right?

Thanks for reading!