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

The good...

pausing
    where stream
        pauses


                             one
                             peb
                             ble's
                             got

                             a
                             pin
                             hole
                             cave


                             holding
                             this

                             3
                             centi

                             meter
                             stone--

                             cliff
                             in hand

                             &
                             leaping
                        (from diorama, John Martone)




The bad...

FLOWERS

for Joanne

sunburn

of the toes and feet

afterwards

showers

must on a shoe

sure arm today

didn't we turn


off the television

the more fresh beach you wash the cars
                   (from SENTENCES, Robert Grenier)
________________________________

In minimalist writing there's "receptional poetics" or there's nothing. The work is received. There's the received tensions of tradition and its wonderful "dissolutions", as Frank said, like the falling pebble whose diameter is indistinguishable from the "cliff in hand", or there isn't. There's, in short, the difference between that ineffable leap from stream stillness--is the pebble in hand or the pebble alone doing the leaping?--and Grenier's always studded ordinariness. The effect in Grenier is of the dreary afternoon sunburn on a deserted beach. Which is just what it set out to do.

It's always through the eye of the pinhole, however, that great verses fall...