Poetry. "Dear Lawrence, Reading yr psychotic book, I swear I feel "ting'd with a resplendent glow," which is what Keats wrote of Byron's verse when he compared it to a moon- soaked cloud. The whole point is that the militarization of our life world is already the realization of the market's aestheticization, which makes your lines totally redundant. I mean, the autonomy of yr poem is adjunct to that of a Kalashnikov. Did you write this poem in a cave or a closet? I'll no longer look for utopia in a piece of military hardware."--Rob Halpern, from the Afterword
Plato's Closet treads indelicately yet with profound subtlety on the subject of community-- the polis and the hinterland it populates with idyllic shepherds to distract from the scapegoats, thieves, heretics, and wolves proliferating there. By deploying an overwrought rhetoric by turns misogynist, melancholic, and masochistic, the poems attempt to trace the invisible curves and lumps of imperial masculinity, whose decadence has finally purified it of its civilized ornamentation-- to the point where it can perhaps be drowned in the bathtub. Plato's Closet' s references range from the classical to Internet porn, Urban Dictionary and gay male fetishism, and features warlords grooming proté gé s, female soldiers magically sprouting new hardware, and jilted lovers-- of empire, of wisdom, of war-- whose violent plaints signal the last redoubt of male sexual entitlement.
