Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Poem


The More I Read You

the more I read you the more I need to
take care in my use of the pronoun
the “irreducible”

you versus the sharpened stick used
to accuse or shame or both through lists
Maxine Gadd

when asked by Daphne Marlatt* about
her use of you, yu and u what’s the diff
told her

a number of things that include the use
of i and I but of you, yu and u and their
upper case

variants Maxine says “Because it makes
them hard to read. Because most people
read so

efficiently they don’t even know they’re
spelling so there’s a certain few things
--”

and here she tells us about the i and the I
but of the you, yu and u she speaks of
“different tones

of voice and each tone registers on a scale
of familiarity or love to alienation, rage,
confusion --

who am I when I call myself ‘you’ which
is and odd poetic convention, often I’m ‘yu’,
someone I’m

trying to objectify so to analyze or put down...
then there is the great ‘U that art out there, U
that art’”

most important to remember from Maxine is
that yu and u are, as Daphne’s echoes, “tough
and barbaric”

but this other you, quite literally this Other
that Luce Irigaray speaks of in “Approaching
the Other

as Other”** is in “[o]ur culture generally entrusted
...to God-the-Father” but in the relationship of
the I

and the you the tendency is for the you to be
“reduced to an ‘object’ of knowledge or an
‘object’ of

love” and thus smothered instead of “recognizing
the irreducible difference of the other in relation
to me”


* Gadd, Maxine. Lost Language: selected poems by Maxine Gadd. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1982
** Irigary, Luce. "Approaching the Other as Other", Between East and West: From Singularity to Community. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003



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