[Realpoetik] ELISA GABBERT

[RealPoetik Magazine]

from The Self Unstable



Crows can tell one human from another, but we are unable to distinguish
among various crows. This is mischaracterized as a paradox. Humans may be
racist, but crows can’t read, and robots can’t really dance. All species
evolve toward overspecialization. If you find anything other than food or
sex interesting, it’s signaling.



§



In a movie culture there is no play within the play. Writers hope for good
actors, but when the acting is good you don’t notice the writing. The
audience wants immersion, not realism; realism is no more immersive than
reality, and no more a genre. If truth is a sliding scale, one must test the
extremes.



§



A paragraph is a way of saying one thing over and over again. Books are an
act of supreme redundancy. What’s the difference between ambivalence and
ambiguity? POV.



§



You lose naïveté before you gain wisdom. In the interim, you believe that
everything is about sex. Your dreams are given to obvious motifs: the motif
of your blows falling weak and ineffectual, glancing off the enemy. The
motif of the foreign airport, being unable to pack, having nothing to wear.
In dreams, even sex is symbolic of sex. All art is conceptual.




*Elisa Gabbert* is the poetry editor of *Absent *and the author of *The
French Exit* (Birds, LLC) and *Thanks for Sending the Engine* (Kitchen
Press). Her poems have appeared in *Colorado Review,* *Denver Quarterly, The
Laurel Review, Pleiades, **Salt Hill, *and *Sentence, *among other journals,
and her nonfiction has appeared in *Mantis, Open Letters Monthly, *and *The
Monkey & The Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics*. She currently lives
in Boston and blogs at The French Exit (http://thefrenchexit.blogspot.com/).

-- 
RealPoetik
www.realpoetik.org
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