Buy Me, Get Me Free: New Poems

Can poetry remain what it is when it must prove itself on the market, must function-and be rehabilitated, analyzed and compelled to confess its secret to do so? To buy is to purchase, to have a purchase on is to understand-thus, for a work to be for sale implies for the buyer that it exists solely for the subject to consume, exists solely to be understood, to be dominated. But for the object to be dominated by the subject, the subject must already be seduced by the object’s charm. It is by this enchanting seduction, as over against the consumer’s cool demand to be seduced, that poetry frees itself from the purchasing power of the subject. The poet apes the subject’s simulations for compatibility’s sake (the other-directedness of his ‘self-expression’) with a sovereignty of thought that can only lead to his ex-communication. Buy Me, Get Me Free is the follow-up text to Critical Leisure: The Poetry of Simulation, composed of two sections of poems and a personal collection of aphorisms, journal entries and opinions.