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words are not the truth

2023-06-06

3 minute read

Been thinking about poetry and language lately. I remember mentioning to a friend a while ago, I think (I hope) in the context of AI, something along the lines of "words are not the truth". About the distance between what there is and how we describe it. Poetry can make this distance really clear in the most beautiful ways. I hope it can be a more broadly accepted tool for understanding and exploration. Of course I also want more people I can talk to about it. A Voz Limpia is a chance for this, despite a feeling I'm a little ashamed of:

a feeling I'm a little ashamed of

I've felt a certain disdain towards poetry as personal expression (and I think art in the same context). What brings me shame is that this extends to personal expression that often expresses and protests a state of oppression the poet is in. A Voz Limpia has many poems about feminism, colonialism and heteronormativity. What it's like to be a foreigner, to leave your own struggling country for a chance at financial stability and be punished for it. These are all urgent and important topics, yet I can't help feeling unsatisfied with a lot of the poetry, as if the urgency and importance of the topic undermines the ability to write it with deep feeling, without cliche.

This could well be because for me these problems are not felt nearly so really. I can, with a bit of cognitive dissonance and self deception, pretend they do not exist. Many people don't have this distance of priviledge. So maybe that is why I don't appreciate the poems, or feel distaste at what reads to me as cliche protests.

I've got another idea too: That the urgency of these issues is so great that saying it, at face value, feels like enough, and introducing subtlety, ambiguity, or confusion into the work would be to dilute an important theme. I don't belong to this camp. Maybe I'm too hopped up on Against Interpretation. I'm going to pull short of trying to come to a decent conclusion, I just think I want to hear more poetry and discuss more poetry that explores the formal elements heavily and deals with more ambiguity.

Now to go maybe against all I've just written, here's a great poem by Margaret Atwood.

Shadow By Margaret Atwood

  1. Someone wants your body.
  3. What's the deal?
  4. Beg, borrow, buy, or steal?
  5. Gutter or pedestal?
  6. That's how it is with bodies
  7. that someone wants.
  9. What's it worth to you?
  10. A rose, a diamond,
  11. a cool million, a joke, a drink?
  12. The fiction that this one likes you?
  14. You could bestow it, this body,
  15. like the generous creature you are,
  16. or blackout and have it snatched
  17. and you'd never know.
  19. Kiss it goodbye, the body
  20. that was once yours.
  21. It's off and running, it's rolled in furs, it's dancing
  22. or bleeding out in a meadow.
  24. You didn't need it anyway,
  25. it attracted too much attention.
  26. Better with only a shadow.
  28. Someone wants your shadow.

Somebody wants your body

I've been in the office today. I'm finally getting work to do, and realising I need some way to manage my tasks, but not sure how to do it? I remember in my last job I didn't really know either, I would just make directories and save everything in a notes.md file. I guess I can do what I know for now. I'd also like to know what I'm working on though, like throughout the day. I want a view of what my day actually looks like. My best idea is a semi intrusive app similar to Pompom.

On that note, I want to install pompom at work. I still want to remake it in swift, to make it more mac native and not have to use all the node build tools for wails.io. I do, of course, need to redesign it slightly. I hope that, because it is so simple, it will be simpler to redesign. I feel delusional even typing it.

what else

I'm listening to [The Disposessed by Ursula K. Le Guin] and un-surprisingly enjoying it. It's a fascinating idea, and features some beautiful phrases, as her work so often does. What feel like beautiful, small truths.

listening to

A Fragile Correspondence (19/5/23)

questions