Poem

The More I Read You

the more I read you the more I need to

take care in my use of the pronoun

the “irreducible”

you versus the sharpened stick used

to accuse or shame or both through lists

Maxine Gadd

when asked by Daphne Marlatt* about

her use of you, yu and u what’s the diff

told her

a number of things that include the use

of i and I but of you, yu and u and their

upper case

variants Maxine says “Because it makes

them hard to read. Because most people

read so

efficiently they don’t even know they’re

spelling so there’s a certain few things

--”

and here she tells us about the i and the I

but of the you, yu and u she speaks of

“different tones

of voice and each tone registers on a scale

of familiarity or love to alienation, rage,

confusion --

who am I when I call myself ‘you’ which

is and odd poetic convention, often I’m ‘yu’,

someone I’m

trying to objectify so to analyze or put down...

then there is the great ‘U that art out there, U

that art’”

most important to remember from Maxine is

that yu and u are, as Daphne’s echoes, “tough

and barbaric”

but this other you, quite literally this Other

that Luce Irigaray speaks of in “Approaching

the Other

as Other”** is in “[o]ur culture generally entrusted

...to God-the-Father” but in the relationship of

the I

and the you the tendency is for the you to be

“reduced to an ‘object’ of knowledge or an

‘object’ of

love” and thus smothered instead of “recognizing

the irreducible difference of the other in relation

to me”

* Gadd, Maxine. Lost Language: selected poems by Maxine Gadd. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1982
** Irigary, Luce. "Approaching the Other as Other", Between East and West: From Singularity to Community. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003