... browsing Ron Silliman's Blog - as I do daily (sometimes more than that due to our US/Belgian time differences) - I see a link to Creeley's "sound shapes". What? Someone else? Damn! Pre-empted again!
In fact, it's a link to this very Blog. One of those you-see-yourself-as-someone-else-in-the-mirror effects (as happened to me once in a Paris metro compartment).
I'll admit to feeling chuffed.
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Today, boys and girls, we’re going to look at ‘Song of the Chinchilla’ by Lisa Jarnot*. I liked the poem immediately – and I’ve given it to ...
2 comments:
Hello Carpenter, old chap. Just wanted to add that Silliman's praise for Joseph Lease's BROKEN WORLD is entirely justified. Got a copy about a week ago & it really is impressive. And too short, as Silliman also observed. Still, good to leave the reader wanting more, I suppose.
Also, on the subject of the red wheelbarrow (I'm enjoying all the stuff you've been posting btw), I thought you might like this observation from Michael Schmidt at Carcanet from the 2005 (!) edn of the Writers' & Artists' YrBook (p.304):
"For three decades I have been publishing William Carlos Williams' poetry. 'So much depends / upon // a red wheel / barrow . . .' Eight simple lines have earned Williams' estate, and his publisher, between £27 and £35 per week over that period."
That's more than a grand a year -- pretty good going. Oddly enough, I don't think it's the best poem in "Spring and All" (yes, you're right -- it still seems so modern), but I think people need neat encapsulations of Big Ideas & it was the fate of this poem (quite beyond the poet's power to prevent or encourage this) to represent a tendency in modern verse.
Walrus
Hello!
Wondered where you'd gone - it gets lonely on the uncertain shores of Blogland.
This morning I'm cooking up something on Ray DiPalma - probably an 'Easy Poem/Difficult Poem' section based around 'Fragment' an early & very bizarre poem.
I'll go along with you on the Red Wheel barrow - and wish I could find a way to make 16 words pay so well!
I'm really conscious of the available time - I can fit about 3 hours concerted work in a day (and anything else is a bonus). Plus we're off to France for the annual holiday very soon.
I could spend a week on 'Spring and All' - those poems are opening up to me this time round in all sorts of ways. 'The universality of things' is a cracker.
I suppose what's really exciting me - kind of a Guest-like illumination - at this moment is how sound structures are working parallel to (or at odds with) syntactic directions. And that's what leads me on to Ray D (and why I looked at Creeley & Guest earlier).
Things seem to be falling into 2,000 to 3,000 word chunks - which would mean 25 sections for something of substance? If I could get there by 1 September I'd be pleased with myself. While working in quotations and 'interludes' etc. I want to keep that 'open' form.
On the other hand I want to develop my other stuff - so Riddles will probably take second place soon.
But as you've said - one enriches the other.
Did I mention that I found the Gil Evans Hendrix CD? (It's not actually that good on a re-listen). Mengelberg, though, is interesting.
Thunder & rain here.
Do give me your thoughts on any of my ramblings - otherwise I'm spinning Coleridgean threads out of my own head.
Cheers
The C
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