Savage Love

I was chatting with my students the other day, and we ended up talking briefly about an old piece of mine, The Savage Years. It dawned on me that despite having a web-ready PDF of this, I have never put it online, so here it is.

It should print off quite nicely, albeit rather largely, onto A4 or American Letter sized paper.

Clearly taking Ron Silliman's Sunset Debris as a starting point for linguistic enquiry, I decided to write a piece of work which used repetition and duration as ways of examining the nature of the sentence, and what happens during the course of repeated assertions.

Interestingly enough for me, the writing process produced the enquiry. I found myself considering the instability of the biographical of the child-now-adult TV and movie star. Rather than being about him, the poem became about projected statements of fact. Subsequently, his name almost becomes an expletive as the poem progresses (literally, as the name flips between subject and replacement object).

I think - I hope, that the sheer length of this piece prevents it from becoming a cheap gag. Instead, the repetition of the formal structure of the statement attempts to drum home truths which conflict, and compound their tensions by projecting them onto one unwitting subject. Whatever, it was a lot of fun to write. I'm working on another, "To Don't List", which is looking at the nature of negative statements...