Logic, is a funny name for a series of poems that seem to be mostly void of all logic. During last Monday’s class, we focused on this series of poems from Percival Everett’s re: f(gesture) and then we were told to discuss them, relating to the phrase “WTF?”.
While researching the etymology of the word logic, I learned that the word originates from the greek word logos, meaning word or reason. While reading the collection of poems for like the third time, I was still struggling to find any sort of logic or reason. Throughout the course of the semester I’ve learned that most of the time there’s not solid meaning to Everett’s work and if you just use your personal experiences you can give anything a reason.
While reading the poem titled “6″ aloud to my friends, which coincidentally is about the number 7, I was incredibly intrigued by the concept that I interpreted. The poem says, “Men gone, but not seven. Seven men lost, but not seven. Seven is, will be. All men will die but not seven.” (70). I read this to mean, essentially, you can get rid of seven men, seven of anything really, but you can’t get rid of the number seven.
This for me was the most logical poem of the collection because it made sense. You can erase 7 texts, throw away 7 shirts, but still the number 7 will remain. The WTF part kicked in a little after when I was drafting this blog post and thought “WTF how did he even come up with this concept?”. I mean really, Percival Everett’s brain seems to be so complex but at the same time, maybe its the readers brains that are complex and we just read these random things that he writes and come up with our own logic to make them make sense to us because not many people like to have a lack of meaning or reason. Does Everett use his own lack of logic to force ours?