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Birthday #8. Pirates.

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Meanwhile woke in time to run then slipped back into bed with some trick in mind about lying awake there for a few minutes longer.

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More related to aesthetics, "good/strong"-ness, and the political. "A work that was radical was a good work," she begins. From "What Anti-Colonial Poetry Has to Say about Language and Why It Matters":

They felt annoyed when their friends did not want to discuss colonialism or did not want to go to the African film festival because they did not like that sort of stuff. What sort of stuff they would say defensively. It was like nationalism. They had been against it as they were for the radical at one time. But now they saw it as a tool, one that could liberate and repress, like most tools. And they felt obligated not to dismiss it too easily. They cringed when the woman who was at Cambridge sent them a paper in which she kept talking about all of American poetry as if it was one whole thing and she said that that poetry is guilty of nationalism when she meant something more like jingoism. Or when their work appeared in an anthology and in the anthology it was said that what was good about the work in the anthology was that it was anti-nationalist. They knew these feelings were silly, unfair, even damaging to their relationships with kind people. But they continued to find it impossible to talk about aesthetics without also talking about who took over who. It was like nature poetry. It enraged them if it didn't somehow address the human occupation of nature or culture.

--Juliana Spahr

(read the whole thing here)

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