Mina Loy
I love her for her persona and plainspoken absurdity, for her realness and surrealness, and for her as a character of embodied personhood, embodied in abstraction, ambiguity, and ostentatious obscurity that coheres in her poetics of manifesto. I love her for her tragic self-fulfilling prophetic futurism.
Emily Brontë
I love her as a labour of love — reading her is work, but I like it — her tangible intangible otherworldliness is fragile; a delicate, intricate paper cut-out I hold up to the light: pretty, yes, but also complex, the shadows it casts are haunting — a radiance floods in through the tiny spaces.
Gertrude Stein
I love her for her her, for her tenderly, for her buttons and buttons and cake. I love her for her and her if, and for her maybe, and her topsy turvy and her never and yet fully fully and yet, for her her, for her fullness, I love her for her if and if not now when instantaneity — for her dizzying circularity that delights in the unmediated materiality of language itself.
Anne Carson
I love her for the arc of the swoon that her crystalline thought-waves produce in the hallways and archways and stairwells of my understanding of Poetry and Time. I love her for her swerves and segues and discursivity: antiquity and Proust, Eros and grief, Brigitte Bardot, Godot, and conversations with the sky delivered in self-possessed deadpan, and most of all for her clarity, reading her is like looking into a calm and bottomless lake — I’ve fallen in.
Sappho
I love her for the gorgeousness of her want. I love her for her love of love.
Razielle Aigen is a Montreal-born writer and artist. She is author of, “Light Waves The Leaves” (above/ground press 2020). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Entropy, Ghost City Review, Contemporary Verse 2, Train: a poetry journal, Bad Dog Review, The Anti-Languorous Project, and elsewhere. More of Razielle’s work can be found at razielleaigen.com and through Twitter @ohthepoetry