Invasive Plants

Invasive PlantsSometimes it seems like Leftwich hasn't really tried very hard to keep his world out of his poems. I've been reading him forever, and everywhere I look there's nothing but world, world upon world, world after world. Every word is a world, moving from an earlier world, through the present worlds, into or towards a later world. Words after words, words between words, words as above and so below words. Finally, in the last stages of his successless

Sometimes it seems like Leftwich hasn't really tried very hard to keep his world out of his poems. I've been reading him forever, and everywhere I look there's nothing but world, world upon world, world after world. Every word is a world, moving from an earlier world, through the present worlds, into or towards a later world.

Words after words, words between words, words as above and so below words. Finally, in the last stages of his successless anticareer, he has given us these Invasive Plants. It is as if a kind of confession: some of his words are not fully his. If he was the president of anything, we would force him to resign. As it is, he operates as if an independent contractor in the franchise of the poem, answering to no one, not even himself, stealing every word that isn't nailed down. I hear the Beats. I hear Rimbaud. I hear William Blake, Jon Langford, Yeats and Eliot, Patti Smith. Invasive poets, tangling the trellis of the Leftwich mind. Remember as you read him: these thoughts are not your thoughts, and some of them are not even his.

--Retorico Unentesi, Leftwichean expert emeritus, The Institute For Study And Application, Kohoutenberg