who's your dada?

Badass poet Davis Schneiderman was here this week. He is such a post-modernist that when he deconstructs books, he literally deconstructs them, as in tears them apart, as in takes a saw to them. He's a literalist that way. He also boils books and calls them...cookbooks. All in all, he's pretty rad.

I unlearned a lot from Davis's visit:

Words belong to everyone! You can take your favorite novel, rearrange the words, and make a whole new text. And it doesn't have to make sense because it's the reader's responsibility to construct meaning.

Authorial intent is sooo 19th century.

Words want to be free, but sometimes they are expensive.

The Spruce Goose is afraid of the dark.

Weird Al has to ask permission for his parodies, because he makes money off of them.

Sometimes, the reader eats the writer, even though writers aren't very tasty.

Davis has 99 problems, but writing poetry ain't one.

During his reading, Davis clipped a rope to his belt and let the audience do whatever we wanted. Because his words belong to us! Therefore, he does too. We discovered that, unlike most writers, Davis is delicious.