-----Original Message-----
From: Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Oct 7, 2003 4:42 PM
Well, there we are. For over a year I have been battling with one poem
that at one point I thought was done, except that in reading it over I
discovered its (for me) real subject and the damn thing felt and became
totally out of balance. It's an experiment in working with three levels of
time feeding ultimately into a series of singular moments that reflect each
other: but the climactic moment of the poem breaks away from the
"experiment" of interweaving episodes into the present and frankly takes
over the emotional core of the piece...and this is maybe 50 lines before
the end of something that runs over 200. It also, not coincidentally,
works with the fixed and repeatable--... How do you weave all this and more (I sound like a
carnival barker) into something cohesive and coherent? CAN you? What has
to be collapsed for this to work?
Well, it's hard to say without reading the work, but I'm sure that you can
weave all this and much more, though I would wonder what you meant by
"cohesive and coherent," for it sounds as if the writing of the poem, along
with the discovery of its real subject, is fluid, as much unraveling as weaving
together, and involves a kind of unknowingness on the poet's part, so how
then can it so definitively fit a "cohesive and coherent" aim? It's a little
like taking a loom and using so many threads of varying colors, perhaps
more than you've ever tried to weave together before, and then saying
now how can I make the darned thing into a sweater? I am reminded of
the time I went and visited the serpent mound in Ohio, a great serpent
of grass made out of heaped earth by a vanished people, and what struck
me was that they made this great coiling serpent along the crest of a ridge
without any benefit of an overview. The modern visitor can climb a fire
tower lookout and see the whole thing uncoiling along the ridge, but
as near as anyone can tell, they created it merely by sensing it, seeing
its shape from the ground. Similarly the Nazca shapes in Peru, unless
of course, one believes the UFO theories! So the overview or the cohesive
and coherent aim isn't necessary, if you just follow the threads.
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
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