Jordana on Williams's "The rose is obsolete"

This is one of those moments when I feel that any words that I say can only do a disservice to words that say so much. I cried when I read this poem (at the risk of virtually unloading wagonloads of emotion on my classmates); maybe that is more articulate than whatever I can say about the poem in and of itself.

That is the point that our favorite naked dancer is making with the poem -- it is at the edge of the petal that love waits. The meeting of one thing with another is yet another encounter, just as passionately charged with emotions and consciousness as the other ones we have seen, just as keenly aware of the interactions of selves and separateness. So here again is the modernist idea that substance lies within context, within the geometry of juxtaposition, in the inseparable quality of fundamental separation. The rose in and of itself is obsolete, because it never was truly in and of itself...it is in and of us.

Love is at the end of roses -- I send my thoughts, falling off the edge of our virtuality, to you all.

Jordana