Saturday, January 27, 2007


JH: Thanks! Hard to tell if disjunction was always present to readers/auditors of poems (parataxis is an old term), or if it is more noticeable now. The progression from word to word is a mystery, and the impetus to get from one word to another and have those words stick together intellectually is an argument for convention, whether linguistic generally or literary specifically. However, intellectual cohesion is an argument against words, do you think? Why not be content with one word? There could be one word in a poem, with the other words being literature. How to highlight that word? A series could be a way to highlight a recurring word distinguished from a word recurring in a poet's poems such as "the", "and", or "a". But why distinguish "Fu Manchu" or "Virginia" from "the" or "and"? The words "the" and "and" have fixed functions, while "Fu Manchu" and "Virginia" are more fluid. How to make characters of all words? Would this involve a leveling, an equality, of all the words in the poems? Would this be impossible? Perhaps this leveling can be hinted, as in the opening words of your poem "" jerking goshawks from the sky: "fortunate breathing mechanism". Each of these three words has an equal weight, and must be encountered one by one, rather than sequentially as such. This establishes a meter, encouraging future words in this poem to be read similarly. Does equality of words have to do with the compression ideal of lyric poetry? Brevity, and traditional meter such as iambic pentameter, may be an attempt at an equality of reader attention to each word.

AHB: You are right about the question of disjunction back then. because of the necessities of metre and rhyme, the reader expected a certain amount of acrobatics. and you think how Whitman tended toward not disjunction but a word order that sounds like an assertion of set form but isn't (Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, When Lilacs First in the Dooryard Bloomed) (Me Imperturbe???). progression from word to word, as you say, is a mystery. I guess how I distinguish prose from poetry would be word weight. prose is a flow with highlights whereas poetry wants each word weighing in. of course one can turn to such a poem as Aram Saroyan's that consisted of one word: lighght. I always found metre rather distracting. the smartasses like to crow how everything by Dickinson can be sung to “The Yellow Rose of Texas”. yes, if you give unequal weight to the words, which can hardly have been her intent. in fact, she puts so much weight on each word, that her syntax perforce becomes puzzling. “Goshawks” does illustrate a sense of momentum in which I write. hefting those three words as they arrive, then the next, then the next. I'm incapable of the spare sort of compression of Robert Grenier, or look at Tom Beckett's work. your own poetry often has an 18th century lyric sound, yet words jam together in a tidy compression. I think my own compression consists in elision, which I do as I write. so anyway, here is a poem of yours.


Sawsharks 3a.m. Kingda Ka 3a.m. Tertiary 3a.m. Greenfinch
Steel Dragon 3a.m. Triassic 3a.m. Jackdaw 3a.m. Arsenic
Quaternary 3a.m. Swift 3a.m. Hemlock 3a.m. Gettysburg
Raven 3a.m. Wolfsbane 3a.m. Murfreesboro 3a.m. Violin
Cyanide 3a.m. Chancellorsville 3a.m. Clavichord 3a.m. Arquebus
Vicksburg 3a.m. Pipa 3a.m. Flintlock 3a.m. Mallard...

this poem marks an odd confluence. one notes a number of sources combining here, seemingly several lists intermixed. it is true that each element, even the repeated time, bears equal weight. I think I could kill the poem by explaining it. I like how it opens terrific possibilities.


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