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

The good...

    "I know you, monster-head! Once more face to face. We
take up the long debate where we left off.
    And you may urge your arguments like snouts low over
the water: I will leave you no rest and no respite.
    On too many frequented shores have my footsteps been
washed away before the day, on too many deserted beds has
my soul been delivered up to the cancer of silence.
    What more do you want of me, O breath of origin? And
you, what more would you drag from my living lips..."
                                                                      (from Exile, St.-John Perse)

The bad...

Word's a sentence before it's a word -- I write
Sentences -- When words are, meaning soon follows -- Where
words join, writing is -- One's writing is one writing --
Not all letters are equal -- 2 phrases yield an angle --
Eye settles in the middle of word, left of center -- Reference
is a compass -- Each day -- Performance seeks
vaudeville -- Composition as investigation -- Collage is a
false democracy -- Spelling's choices
                                                             (from FOR L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Ron Silliman)
____________________

Again, Perse's perfect mythopoeia and language fit, drinking at the same stream. And think of all the great  monsters it's foreseen: from Sidney to Proust. I've borrowed his Peregrine and made the conversions to dark exilic moods myself. With him I've made cancer-leafs and burned Jesuits with the anvil-necklace for wanting illusional peewit wives. I know who the Father really is. Why do only the great Talmudists, the great ones! get to enjoy a language fit for the Master of the Universe? La simple chose que voilà applied to skeletons and shores...? Why can't Perse be my Corman?


In Silliman's abcediary a word, phrase & sentence at a time peck in the dirt, envying the superior snouts. Not being one means he has to form the vowels with his ope lips and blow them out, a disgraceful ritual that's sometimes sputters through the beard. In fact, there's neither sense nor Sentence here if you look carefully, just the child's rambling (minus the child's imaginative vision), the sand (minus the seas). Silliman writes sentences (and nothing could be easier) while Perse breathes. In Silliman a series of equal signs to help connect the lines while Perse's "a language free of usage and pure". Silliman's banausic verse fit for advisory boards...puffing at the shores.