Wendy's

Letters to Wendy's as Poetry

Things to consider: Wendy's is apart of American Culture and the symbol, Wendy the logo functions within the bounds of language as something that represents a place where people eat, we are taught this through advertisement and personal experience.

Letters to Wendy's posses three themes of poetry: the exploration of Reason and Imagination through language, the resurrection of language through new associations and the eroticization of words.

Wendy's is a known quality, a fast food place that exist in reality, which Wenderworth uses to create fictional encounters, that explores the relation between Wendy's and seemingly unrelated situations that we are introduced to through Wenderworth's stream of conscious musings. These in turn are his discussion about the value of Wendy's, " imagination is the perception of value." According to Shelley the expression of imagination, while using the other class of mental action, reason, as a starting place is poetry(49pg).
These letters purposefully "obscure," on the surface seek to apprehend new associations and truth about Wendy's. This reconstruction of Wendy's representation through language can be attributed to poetry because it is the cyclic nature of the poetic structure, where language is disheveled in order to devise new relations(51pg). Ultimately Letter's to Wendy's can be seen as an examination of a new language of brand names, their purpose and our perception of them.
Lastly Letters to Wendy's is poetry because it illustrates Barthes theory of pleasurable text by way of the word as erotic. Again the obscure theme employed by Wenderworth has another and different role in its contribution to how we are defining poetry. The obscurity of the letters transform the Wendy's symbol into something erotic. With his continuous suggestion that anything can be related to Wendy's such as pooping, penises, porn, the apocalypse, the first condition of the two opposing conditions. The second condition is enacted because although those things are often considered erotic, they are often used unexpectedly and almost randomly inserted into the letters(42pg).
Letters to Wendy's application of obfuscation engages us to imagine and take pleasure the creation of new affiliations.