If Keston's own tight-weave is calling for more close reading in
reviews, something of a wheeling in and out of the texture and
rhetoric of poetry, with its gaps and punctualities, together with
the corona or haze of pre-states and post-states, I am very much for
it, though I think in the context of a review the textual intimacy
should remain illustrative and not convert the review into poet's
essayism. Essayism has an honourable place but so has the work of
welcome, assessment and reception which needs to look at more general
issues as well. In plotting a poet's liability (as it often does)
this can be tracked back to its origins in rhetorical process and
generosity, to discover a certain inherent apparatus which gets the
work as far as being testable or open to a reading."Reading against"
might detect a poem's capacity to contextualise itself this far, and
so is not just an effect of opposition. I think that is what Drew's
review does successfully, and with underlying consideration for the
poetic materia, even though he doesn't spend much time in reading
through and with the folds of much of the material.
Punctuation as a sort of valve, beckoning from the poem's pre-
space, but luring towards the poem's own close economy, which as
texture finds byways where the valve only diverts passages? But
byways hug texture, perhaps overly compress it... there is a work of
valve, text rather than texture, switch-over within the array of
process.
Peter
Peter Larkin
Philosophy & Literature Librarian
University of Warwick Library
Coventry CV4 7AL UK
Tel: 01203 528151 Fax: 01203 524211
Email: [log in to unmask]
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