#strangeness

The poet Peter Streckfus once remarked that what he loved most in a book of poems was a quality of persistent strangeness — “swimming in the confusion of it” was his phrase for the reader’s initial experience. This quality makes, as Streckfus suggests, an environment; it is not a matter of the shrewdly confused surface or of opacity, nor can it be elaborated into a deliberate aesthetic. Rather, one feels that something has been discovered in the language itself, some property or capacity, some tone never before transcribed, whose implicit meanings the poet has found ways to reveal.

There was a bit of beauty in the strangeness, though, just like there's always a kind of beauty about a wild animal.

I was terrified of people and of my own strangeness.