some thoughts

• A large part of what interests me about poetry is encountering new ways of thinking about things (in general, new ways of thinking about things is something that I love). More specifically, I realized today that an easy way of generating that kind of poetry is through breaking collocation norms.  In linguistics, a collocation is when two words are found together often, and substituting a synonym for one of the words just doesn't work.  Or as the dictionary defines it, "the habitual juxtaposition of a particular word with another word or words with a frequency greater than chance."  For instance, Wikipedia has the example of the collocation of "strong" and "tea" in "strong tea" instead of "powerful tea," which is a phrase that people don't use.
• So, going along with that, I can see breaking collocation norms, changing up phrasemes, as a really productive way of forming poetry.  This is just a fancy way of saying that no one wants clichés.  But think about how much more interesting something can be by just substituting (loose) synonyms.  Like, looking through this list of collocations, what would it mean to say, "confess defeat" instead of "admit defeat"?
• similarly, I can see some good poems coming out of exploring/breaking/substituting language metaphors.  Like how in English (in many... most... all? languages), up = happy, down = sad. More specifically to English, illness = war (battle illness, immune defenses), whereas in Nepal, illness = eating (disease eats you).  Also in English at least, time = money (spend time, waste time), anger = heat (hothead, keep your cool), etc.

• I've been reading a lot of criticisms of capitalism in the articles and it brought to mind how Jesus' views and teachings were developing a pre-communist society. How I think I heard that Marx developed communism from reading about the early church in the NT [source?].
• I haven't really thought about critiquing capitalism until recently. But I can see how that structure of "the more productive you are, the more useful you are." is a really damaging idea.  It locks out those who can't work because of disease, disability, etc. It implicitly encourages euthanasia. It fails to see the humanity and the value of people just as people. And perhaps reflecting on those critiques can help alleviate my current existential crisis of not having a job, aimless yet again, failing to get off the waitlist of med schools, seemingly falling behind all my peers in career/romantic relationships/life/etc. Seeing how much we elevate productivity in our society and knocking that idol down a few notches could be good for my (and others') health.