Wednesday, August 12, 2015

The New Kind of Flesh: "This pit here, this location"

A change of mood with the change of stanza, a need to call out with some specificity a change of place. “This pit here” attempts to project the reader into an immediate situation, while equating that immediacy to “this location” immediately turns toward abstraction, at least in mathematical terms. This pit here is also this location: where we are as readers, you my readers, is a place identified by its coordinates, but a place that can be pointed to with a “this” and where we may be actually situated, wherefore “here.” Nevertheless, it's a pit: pit of hell, pit of this world, pit of the next, pit of the undeworld (the fosse Ezra Pound and Homer dug and poured blood into to revive and make strong the dead for a moment, Canto I). There's a possibility of things happening just here, bad things perhaps – perhaps bad things are happening here now.

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