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.

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



St.-John Perse

In honour of April poetry month I will post (hopefully every day for the entire month) what's hot and what's not:i.e. a good poem and a bad poem placed one under the other, with some comments on why the one's good and the other's not.

The good...

"...There has always been this clamour, there has al-
ways been this splendour.
    And like a great feat of arms on the march across the
world, like a census of peoples in exodus, like a foundation of
empires in praetorian tumult, ah! like an animation of lips
over the birth of great Books,
    This huge muffled thing loose in the world, and suddenly
growing huger like drunkenness..." (from Exile, St.-John Perse)

and the bad...

I am not chosen
but have applied for the job.
I've always wanted to be a Government
of Canada initiative. Starves his body down
so his erection will be proportionally larger
                                                          (Colin Smith from "Straw Man")
________________

Perse's poetry (even in translation: this excerpt in its original French would have made the Smith blemishes look even more laughable) is epical and yet reachable: beautifully cadenced and yet within reach of the feeling eye. But what an eye Perse requires! Not afraid of repetitions because repetitions always, even to infinity, carry something in the poet's pouch nor even of the lonely journey across the piaggia diserta of the songless world, the poem "grows". Yes, the impression it leaves is of a poem flowering even when the covers close.

Smith's offering, sadly in only one of Canada's two official languages, will always remain the "songless" and certainly not through lack of trying. Here's Kootenay writing school specimen holding up the mirror as 'twere to a very purposeful "hysterical, disavowed and disjunctive" initiative. It's what it is and Canada's just the place for it. ( I redden at it) Drunkenness here is always tantamount to smoking teenage weed.