Poem #5

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At first I read this poem as simply Sweet Little Black Kitty’s version of Howl remade as a multi-media performance piece—part rant, part rage, part stage (over)acting, part Buddhist prayer. But I’m rethinking my interpretation of the subtext of her opening statement (“My communication is very important (it’s all capitalized) and I don’t need vowels or digits.”) and am now considering the possibility that this poem is written in two different feline languages or dialects, or, perhaps, it is a single, shorter poem presented in its original and first foreign reprint edition simultaneously.

If, however, my initial interpretation is correct, I believe the second portion of the poem is a lament for the best minds of her generation that have gone homeless or disappeared into the death machine of the animal shelter system.

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Poem # 7

3WE4

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Sweet Little Black Kitty turned on the Caps Lock to write this poem. That usually means she thinks it’s a Big Idea. But, here I see she’s using the caps sardonically, working through her Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup Can phase, underlining and celebrating the obvious.

The artist’s statement? “We are in the midst of a digital revolution.” A revolution in its earlier stages, say, between a three and a four on some kind of feline scale. And the rejoinder to that statement is, “Duh! That’s as obvious as a Campbell’s Soup Can!” Exactly her point.

What the poem is ultimately saying, I believe, is “Let’s get beyond the critical dialectic and move on to grooming ourselves,” as she did after writing this.

Poem # 8

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After a nap Sweet Little Black Kitty jumped up on the table and batted this out. It was like Coleridge coming out of his opiated stupor to jot down his vision of Xanadu. But what is the nature of her dream? I think the brackets enclose states of reverie she is comparing. The double equal signifies not just equality, but unity: the two things flanking the equal sign are not simply equal; they are the same. Our dreams are our reality, and vice versa.

And yet there is a self-conscious note here, an understanding that by suggesting an equality of experience, she is removing herself from either state, and consigning herself to one that dooms those under the influence of its gravity to observe and theorize rather than experience. Those states need not be necessarily the conscious and unconscious, but could be, for example, a meeting of geography and mathematics. It is a powerful lesson in accepting ourselves, in reconciling the public image we hope to project with the reality of what we know to be true.