Sulfuric Acid

Needless to say, based on the article's title, I had no real assumptions or expectations of its content before beginning to read, which made it all the more fascinating to me. I find this concept of characterizing language as a wild, open and unexplored space within our world of solids and materials, language exists on its own plane, above and below general frames of existence or reality. This train of thought offers a new perspective on language, words as part of speech, some encompassing whole or far from whole being. This being is stronger than many other, as language, with its never ending combinations, orders, tricks of punctuation and of writerly tact, may be manipulated into so many interpretations and argumentation, crossing perceptions and views or searching for something newer, honest from a specific frame of sight. Language is tricky. It may be so personal, with the words scrawled in frazzled cursive on the pages of your tired diary, or tapped out madly on your facebook walls but language may be presented on such a grand scale, with horrifying amounts of influence. Take the bibles, our declaration of independence, Magna Carta, Oprah's Book Club, countless magazines and newspapers. Words and language contain in them a power, when used and arranged properly (or improperly whatever the intent may be), that is quite difficult to compare to. I find this to be the angle of perception which words leave out and open to their readers, left to us to interpret using our unique world views, morals, beliefs, hatred, passions, desires, etc. It's an open-ended armada, with limitless ammunition. Poetry is no mere pitiful blood sucking mosquito, it is more of a force which divides. Divides all readers and critics bytheir perceived notions and understandings of the text, whether they believe it and live by it or hate it and rise up against it- poetry and the words cause action, if only in thought. When the author touches on the fact that if we admit there is a wilderness that stands separate from our orderly governed world, and if poetry exists on a similar level of wilderness and wonder, then admitting its apartness in this battle to conquer it as a force to be reckoned with the battle is already lost.

Poetry is considered special because it challenges this notion of preferential taste, condemns those who choose one specific preference, one side of the mirror, strives for a rattling against these constant and unchanging same views. What is the fun in staying the same? Why be stubborn readers and members of this scattered society when we can afford to be a little more welcoming, a little more free formed. To hold out and stand so rooted in meaning that is mundane, already heard, already argued for and against, fixed and unchanging is what bears politics, minutia already authorized and approved by some other body and school of thought. Old and tired meanings lead to nothing new. Meaning should not be seen as normalized and gentrified, but as an investigation of this normalization, a refuting the notion of possible perfection, looking for some sense of interpreted real truth of mind, thought, ideals.

love, Ben