i want to explain about the prynne poem (an intro)
i named this tinyletter after a prynne poem (The Numbers) which i wrote an essay about last year which wasn't a very good essay because i didn't understand the poem, and i still don't, but something about it speaks to me in that it is concerned with paring back, and fragments, and signs and meaning, and etymology, and materiality, which are all very My Shit, so i like to read it & ponder on how i don't understand it. doing a literature degree (or indeed doing two, as i have done, and planning to do more) is weird bc u feel like u have to Understand things in order to write about them, you have to have a Reading, an Interpretation, you have to Say Something. which is kinda true, but kinda not true, and i'm sad that i spent both my degrees in a haze of alternately hysterical / numb depression and never actually took advantage of the opportunity to Try Stuff -- to essay means to try, which is trite but still true, and still imo what the essay should be for -- a question that you want to think further about, to develop, even if you don't reach an Answer that crystallises all of human knowledge so far into a single concluding paragraph that gets u a first. (i wanna write a future tinyletter on essays and academia and (literary) criticism specifically so i will leave this for now, but i am just thinking thru the process of thinking things thru.) i started this tinyletter so i can think about things and try things and write things without being beholden to upload schedules or house style or editors or anyone but myself, basically, but i still want the option to share it, to put it out into the world, otherwise it won't get written down and will just remain inchoate thoughts in my head that i mean to coherently sort thru but don't because no-one will ever read it so i don't bother. also because Being Online™ has ruined physical writing for me forever & expressing my thoughts on paper now feels weird and clunky and not the appropriate format; so i hope that tinyletter, with its relative freedom, will prove a suitably flexible format for my thoughts to move from inchoate to just incoherent. so that's the gist: i want to try stuff out, to think it through, to unpick "the difficult / matter", to "shrink the confines / down" and get at "the / skin over the points, of the bone", and then maybe under the skin of it too.