I had a conversation with the astrologer and poet Nina Janela (@nina.janela - book them!) who is doing a lot for deconstructing long held interpretations of mythical figures in astrology. We were talking about the myth of Venus, and how it gets its femme associations when it is actually masculine. I began a lot of writing around Venus archetypes and rethinking my associations with it by thinking of it as being a ruin and/or a construction site, which is also how I see this character I'm portraying here.
As I was enquiring about this in my writing, it was like my psyche started speaking to me in the syntax of ee cummings, a poet I’m not crazy about. Somehow his idiosyncratic poetics came to mind as an example of the scaffolding of how the different syntaxes of language as a ruin and/or a construction site felt from the inside. It was about turning language into a flexible material that is no longer subject to conventional rules of combination. It was like E. E. Cummings was a pun, a Rom-Com about embodied desire that is non-binary.
In this way, writing is a practice of being in dialogue with different parts of myself, and I’ve always felt that this deep relationship with the practice is as much about reading, as you can see. Writing is like a very old friend and I know it very well, and we know each other before any institutions of language.
"Like the skin had pileated, 'a flower of skin'
A hussy flower panting at the world
horny but not necessarily to horn,
horny to be plucked a new cadency, to an inverse.
horn on the horn / a phone call reversed
Horn becomes noun, verb, adjective all at once,
All syntax falls over on itself like a single piece of paper"
- Erin Honeycutt, excerpt from 'Night School'
"...bring forth your flowers and machinery: sculpture and prose flowers guess and miss
machinery is the more accurate, yes
it delivers the goods, Heaven knows each dream nascitur, is not made . . .)
why then to Hell with that: the other; this,
since the thing perhaps is
to eat flowers and not to be afraid."
- Cummings, E E. Excerpts from “ONE XXXIX” in Is 5. W. W. Norton & Company, 1996.
Photos by @coraefhamilton