Friday, May 30, 2003

I stacked the deck a little in the O'Hara/Andrews cage match, I think. O'Hara seems inward, concerned with his own "sordid identifications"; while Andrews is (aggressively) outward, portraying "You as the human labor saving device," a product of all the economic and political discourses that plug up the poem's arteries.

But both are a kind of slide show of social roles that "I" or "you" might be pressed into. If O'Hara has a gleeful freedom, there's also the "constant anxiety over looks," the sense of the self as a dissipating mist and as a ($2,000,000) commodity. And if in Andrews "you" are helplessly interpellated (by "money gobble gobble money") there's a chance of finding a crack in the delirious excess, the reframing and jumping from one language to another, knowing that "the situation has a situation." Which optimism? and which grace?

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