pOETIC mACRAME*

The new poetic simulacrum, Baudrillard was right: we have reached such a slovenly level of imagination that the imaginative has become a copy of the original, a representation, a poetic simulacra. Imagination has gone the way of the sacred, a profane symbolism that encourages sameness and idolatry. The bipolarisation of the poetic form: the new canon on the one pole, the old canon on the other, a depolarization, a sameness that is both unimaginative and maudlin. Where the middle is the end and the end the middle, and the middle the middle of the end, we are left with an endless beginning, an end without a middle, beginning or end; simply a rehashing of the same wordplay, the signifier/signified, an irreverent Babel, a phallus(ism) that encourages a poetic macramé, a ‘look at me, I’m riding my bicycle with no hands’. Economy of word, simplicity: yes, but not a simulacrum of simplicity, economy and word.

“A woman is beautiful only if she is naked beneath her clothes. A thought is beautiful only if it is naked beneath language. In other words, violent. Each sentence is the spark of the will to power.”
(Jean Baudrillard, 2003, Verso, p.82)