Wow, I'm touched, and so is Elizabeth Williamson, that CA Conrad dedicated his new (Soma)tic poetry exercise to us. Brings me back to his visit, how he so lovingly worked with the students in making (Soma)tic #39 collaboratively, carefully taking down everyone's names who contributed to that particular workshop's exercise. That giving as an insatiable desire to live and thus to live in a world better than this one, for "us." This (Soma)tic speaks to the urgency of each breath, every key stroke, that almost Talumdic insistence that the stakes are high always. I love this:
Suicides irritate me the most, I wish I could take their unwanted leftovers, stupid fucking idiot suicides as though life isn't short enough. Chew this world, it's incredibly delicious. Fuck you for not paying attention.
and its rawness makes me wonder why we don't have more sex on air planes instead of talking about it, especially during long flights. And makes me wonder why it is that poetry which takes itself to have use--and that articulates itself with a little outrage--in whatever form, perhaps as form (say, as illegibility in the face of all that is so ridiculously and dangerously legible in this world) is so often branded as dystopian. Adorno's negative dialectics, to get wonkery, isn't called "negative" because it's pessimistic--just remember, he played jazz piano at late night parties for hours, till the sun rose and everyone was tired of it except him. Next time you read Aesthetic Theory, remember he was a terrible, yet committed doodler. When I think of people who love this world deeply, Conrad is among them. How many stewards of the clouds were there on that flight?
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