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The Forest of
Barbaric Sestinas.
BY DANIEL BORZUTZKY
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The barbaric writer tried to write a barbaric sestina
about his inability to write a barbaric sestina, but in the end
he could not write a sestina about his inability to write
a sestina, he could only write a sestina about his desire
to defecate on all the sestinas he had ever read, which were almost always about love
and its opposite—poetry—which he first encountered in the forest
as a child when he witnessed a wolf eating a kitten. In the forest,
the cracking lilacs turned to mold, and the sestina
about his inability to write a barbaric sestina became a sestina about his love
for defecating on poems about trees, mountains, rivers, and the ends
of seasons; he liked urinating on Robert Frost, but when it came to Rilke, his desire
was to vomit all over the Sonnets to Orpheus, especially the one where Rilke writes
of the cycles of flowers and fruit, which always made the barbaric writer
think of an empty space, an empty forest that contains all other forests
wherein the barbaric writer disguises himself as a barbaric writer who desires
the complete obliteration of language, a difficult subject for a sestina,
though who has not dreamed of writing a silent poem with no end,
for when we write about murder, thought the barbaric writer, we are actually writing about love.
The barbaric writer hated poems in general, but he could not suppress his love
for poems about his hatred for poetry. So he began to write
about his desire to destroy poetry, but in the end
he wrote such beautiful poetry about his hatred for poetry that he could not see the forest
for the trees, for the leaves were filled with villanelles, sonnets, and sestinas
about his barbaric alter ego who desired nothing more than to not desire what he most desired,
and what he most desired, or so he thought, was to defecate on Baudelaire and Keats, a desire
to be realized by abandoning the ideals of truth and beauty, and asserting instead that love
is like vomiting on Goethe and Henry James in the same sestina.
Thus the barbaric writer began his sestina with the words, Today I write
because I cannot vomit or defecate, I can only walk in the forest
and urinate on Shakespeare, Flaubert, Cervantes, Whitman, and even Dante, for the end
of poetry will be achieved only when ordinary barbarians, like you and me, unite to end
the practice of admiring texts, and replace it with the desire
to destroy texts in ceremonies of blood, vomit, defecation, and book burnings in forests.
But there remained the problem of love,
for though he wanted to have no affectionate feelings for poetry, the barbaric writer
could see only beauty in the hatred that filled every word of his sestina
about the end of poetry. The barbaric writer loved hatred, and hated love;
nevertheless, he knew that his desire for love, and not hatred, had inspired him to write
the Forest of Barbaric Sestinas in the forest of barbaric sestinas.
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