Thrips uprear to adhere
to joints, to the base, to napes,
to the underface of numerators on foot.
Thrips and thrums from lupine heaps.
As the lee of each caravel, unraveled
without Americanizing, snorts loudly,
plow handles give way in a calamitious spasm,
with a puny pulse unfortunately given
to blowing its nose on the back of its wrist.
(from Trilce, César Vallejo)
The bad...
An
orange
our
sun
fire
pulp
whets
us
(everyday)
for
us
eat
it
its
fire's
unconsumed
(from "A"- 14, Louis Zukofsky)
________________________________
Olson couldn't read Zukofsky and neither can I: music! By virtue of the tin-eared! I just can't read it!
Vallejo, however, nervously "thrums" with it, down to the bristly thrip wing. A music for insect and tree. If insects kill the tree, at least you can hear it, silently but steadily gutted til it crumble like the last one. There is, and a true poetry must record, the gnawing of the palmated leaf and the shiny twig til it fall into some rhapsody, too. And I haven't even begun to talk about the ships. Just imagine!
3 comments:
I got as far into "A" as "A-12" ....
I can (still) pick up Pound's Cantos or
Olson's Maximus
open 'em any:where
get into the "swing" (rhythms, music) of 'things'
&
amuse my self... sort use
for some reason neither Olson nor Pound
"blow me away" (overwhelm me with their methodology or scholarship
as LZ so does...
as I recall, LZ' short poems o.k.
seems to me to be a difference here/there of
either being a 'magician' or of being 'magic'
maybe someone ought to just droop the either-or
posture ... just drop the "or" and go with the "and"
this AND that rather than this OR that ?
"use" should be as I typed it "uve"
damn these automatic 'one-siz fits all'
programs !
next thing y'all will know?
the choice for a "new" leader will be no choice
'tall !
Ed,
I haven't read Olson's "Maximus" yet and Pound was prescribed undergraduate reading for me: at least there was erudition and respect for 'sources' there, done in interesting 'collage' style
Zukofsky just strikes me as some academics' pet poet: tightening every screw and bolt to make that "upper limit music" boiler run.
I just can't stomach it.
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