on 8/3/01 5:41 PM, Henry at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> I guess you wrote before my latest "Graham" missive, Candice. I admitted that
> the example Mark sent was NOT bombast - and there is something pleasing
> in the conjunction of verse & river. I must stop issuing pronunciamentos
> - it's not fair to a poet I haven't read very thoroughly - and yet I
> can't help speculating that that "I say 'iridescence' / and look down"
> line - its self-conscious, self-assertive preciosity - is the line
> that apotheosizes 20 years of US neo-romantic effusions - and predicts
> quite clearly the weaknesses embedded in Graham's more ambitious poems.
Oh keep those pronunciamentos coming, Henry! If you hadn't expressed
your irritation over that "iridescence" line, I wouldn't have attended to it
enough to start delving for the etymologies, with which it appears "The
Surface" is quite packed, but so delicately interwoven as to be, er,
overlooked. There's the reference to "messages" and "messengers," for one
thing--Iris is a messenger of the gods as well as the goddess of the
rainbow. Then there are the terms that can be read as references to a lens:
"glinting," "glassy," "bending," obviously, but also those that literally
describe the action of the lens called an iris diaphragm (Webster's 10th ed.
has a drawing of it on the page with its various "iris" entries). "It has a
hole in it" indeed, and as that aperture opens and closes, vision
concentrates, dissolves, and could be said to quicken and loosen--as do iris
bulbs in their "cold/bed" as the ground temperature rises.
When you read the poem as a series of shifting perspectives driven by that
widening/narrowing lens from "It has a hole in it. Not only where
I/concentrate to "I say _iridescent_ and I look down," isn't "iridescent"
the perfect word for what the eye bespeaks? Maybe it's supposed to
_irritate_, like a speck.
?
Candice
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