Mike Esteves’s Reviews > The Life You Want > Status Update

"'The poet's words and rhythms are not his utterance so much as his resistance', as the poet Geoffrey Hill wrote in his appropriately entitled The Enemy's Country. Resistance, that is say, is always a way of talking about agency and language, and invention; it is a way of trying to sort out, as it were, our determinisms from our freedoms."

"...ordinary everyday behaviour may be an unconscious probe to find out what the other person will do with what I do or don't do, with what I say or don't say, whether they can imagine and articulate the need in it; whether they can see something in it that I can't... As though ordinary life is a performance art in front of...anyone else who could be interested in one's wants and needs..."

don't take refuge in cultural clichés about pessimism and optimism, but find out what a look at the worst does to you, or for you. And don't try and merely extricate the worst from the best, but, in William Empson's famous and useful phrase, consider how you might 'straddle the contradictions'. Don't assume you know what the worst, or indeed the best, is.

"Does anybody have any new ideas about what we human beings might manage to make of ourselves?"