April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

To look at the river made of time and water
And remember that time is another river,
To know that we are lost like the river
And that faces dissolve like water.

To be aware that waking dreams it is not asleep
While it is another dream, and that the death
That our flesh goes in fear of is that death
Which comes every night and is called sleep.
                       (from "Ars Poetica", Jorge Luis Borges)

The bad...

I am writing now in preconceptions

Those of sex and ropes

Many frantic cruelties occur to the flesh of the

                              imagination

And the imagination does have flesh to destroy

And the flesh has imagination to sever

The mouth is just a body filled with imagination
                                 (from "Elegy", Lyn Hejinian)
__________________________

Nothing deep-sixes the poem more than misused space. Hejinian's "Elegy" is the proof. It's in that senseless space of hers. The place of 'repetition' is in Borges peopled with spirits and waters, and the faery borders between them. Spaces are here a violation. He dreams waters and a beautifully irreal order follows; Hejinian, trying to impress Silliman and Watten only, has managed to clumsily string a venerable form through the most random word associations (which perhaps explains the need for so much notebook space). It's not surprising that imagination ends in the oral cavity. Borges, loner with little formal education, teaches more than Silliman, Watten and Hejinian put together; Borges, the working-class librarian had read more than Silliman, Watten and Hejinian put together; Borges, the blind poet sees more than Silliman, Watten and Hejinian put together.

The "Ars Poetica" of Jorge Luis Borges, or only the two strophes cited, hold more than all the Language of Silliman, Watten and Hejinian put together. Borges ends in a waking dream.