Red leather suitcase filled with Polaroid snapshots. Or Novalis, his fragments. What the body desires but the mind will not allow. Or else, what the mind wants. Language—silence and its shattered iterations. Guyotat's desire to make a new language was so overpowering, by the end of 1981, he was living the creation of his language with such obsession he gave up eating, lost half his body weight, and was rushed to hospital to be resuscitated from a coma that was nearly fatal. On the U-Bahn at night I carry my own damage— inside the body—inside the mind—my own self- made language. I stop at stations based on calculations constructed entirely on invisible patterns of this summer’s intrinsic molecular systems. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. In secret, on pink and burgundy-flocked benches in random underground stations, I sit in my silence and wait.
Join Poetry Daily Editorial Board member Brian Teare for more poetry and conversation about ecopoetics with our third international panel of authors and activists.
"Where Mackey and Howe diverge from the received wisdom is in their refusal to see Gnostic ambivalence and political commitment as mutually opposed. Collective political action, their new books suggest, must be shaped, guided, and channeled with a healthy sense of cosmic irony."
"And this is precisely where poetry and poetic communion shelter me with hope without optimism; where, in the different languages inhabited by beings with whom I share the air and water of this planet, we come together in longing for and choosing another way of interweaving, of searching inside ourselves for new ways to reverse this disaster."
