* lovely

* after reading it a few times, I like the centre best I think

* time tocs but I want to contribute so these notes just plug in some extant
thoughts that got stirred . . .

* 'all flesh is light': a serious & beautiful pun.  is it allusive?  reminds
me of aryam soryan's poem 'lighght.'

* serious puns: check out J H Prynne, William Shakespeare, er, a few others,
I'd guess. John Wilkinson?  (I'm in a narrow little world at the moment.
Alexander Pope, maybe?).  JW: "As the managerial discourses come to pervade
the institutions of personal development, health, social improvement and
education, irruptions of a range of older political and developmental
discourses become increasingly embarrassing."  what follows is a bit
mechanistical for your poem's organic cadence, but . . . our capacity to
predictably manipulate the embarrassment JW talks of is threatened even in
such a small-scale paradigm as the quibble (government's 'High Security
Oversight Group').  some poets try to bolt together an innovative ideological
structure with etymologies -- as though the cohabitation of 'Cupid's arrow'
and 'scud' in the signifier 'missile' means that history has already
underwritten the comparison we wish to make.  Prynne is a poet who is a
student of poets; although his lit crit is pretty weird, it's a satisfying
bridge to Shakespeare -- Shakespeare's relentless word-play (the serious pun
'the rest is silence' sometimes packaged with its worse-than-unsatisfied
groan, 'O, O, O, O, O') is partly constructed by the intervention of
Shakespeare's over-canonicity, by generations of critics straining
tinnitus-swarming ears to hear even the least-pointed pun drop.  from
Shakespeare's over-performance we have an embodied index of how these
linguistic resources may be selectively endorsed: if some bawdy Shakespeare
intended proves irretrieveable in modern performance, another opportunity
erects itself elsewhere (the anachronistic leer of 'fingered their packets').
 in constrast to the director, the lyric poet has mostly delicate and
problematic codes available to control the semantic bulk and variousness
within a term.  so like, the word 'light' as the LAST WORD OF THE POEM lets
me zoom out of it right into vast interfluent stardust lifted by barely
muscles . . . there are other placings where it might happen; tabloids
testify that puns prefer titles too.  more difficult terms are more likely to
be encountered as a dictionary's cross-section (here maybe 'footling',
'listing'; I had to look up 'lissom' and found it turned into a subtle and
splendid word by the synonyms I found)?  erotic phrases will lodge anywhere;
Christian ones are scarcely pickier; and readers with any kind of eng lit
background will be on the look-out for the economic and the psychoanalytic.

* the mock-heroic as, qua, in, the heroic.  (I think some of Slajov Zizek's
book The Sublime Object of Ideology is about this).  I'm wondering how these
syntheses work, if there's a more powerful way of putting sincere/ironic
genuine/sarcastic obliged/responsible heartfelt/situated etc. together than
simply as a rhythm or flux between poles.  here it seems to happen, maybe
through Randolph's note.  the ludicrousness of a child slapping the dirt,
which I want to see sublimely, heart-achingly, is transformed into those
terms by what it would seem unfair and ugly to interrogate.  the motive, or
line of motivational forces, (perhaps) prickles all along with a kind of
biological substrate -- that tenderness or happiness evoked in Randolph
watching Teddy might have to do with signals released right out of a parent's
genetic depths, an inscription that isn't compromised by this bad bad society
we live in.  in this case, it can underwrite what, when we dissect the
synthesis, we can come to call the genuine or the heroic, even though it is
directed at the codes and conventions of the mock-heroic, the sarcastic,
which are the best forms available to express the sentiment (though they
threaten to invert it).  perhaps this is clearer: coming to terms with the
stylistic-ness, the rhetorical-ness, the craft which produces a poem's heart
and truth and feeling and deep meaning, including information about that
stylistic-ness in the poem, doesn't necessarily place the poem as a merely
amusing, radically-contingent phenomenon in a field of endlessly shifting
intertextuality.  it DOESN'T place the poem like that for the reader IF he or
she has reason to consider that the labour which accessed the codes and
conventions was not alienated, that those tainted materials were handled
grudgingly, perhaps with a wry knowingness, but flooded through with some
version of an absolute necessity, a pre-linguistic version of heart or truth
or feeling or deep meaning.  in the case of this poem, that's the
contemplation occasioned by a child walking.

* to try to bring these two points together . . . of course, our
consideration of the necessity of the utterance occurs itself in a pragmatic
arena with various objectives and habits.  here on petc, the efficacy of the
poem being situated by its compositional circumstances depended for me on
goodwill, friendliness and the benefit of the doubt given to near strangers.
in an imagined circumstance, say, at the Court of the Basilisk Queen, engaged
in poetomachia for her lavish reptilian amusement and my life, I might want
to appropriate Randolph's note to the poem as that sinister unit, the
'biographical datum.'  in such circumstances, I might be able to ethically
commit myself to the view that 'this big family represses and swamps
mortality anxiety, a repression which returns in the frightening image of
undead armies/eternal life "his skeleton rises / full of smiles" (a grinning
skull?)' or the view that 'the poet has shopped at a lexicon shop stocking
Nestle and Esso, and the melifluousness of this piece is bought at the price
of an un-eraseable "flaw" where missiles strike Baghdad'.  these are view
that I only want to handle in my ACTUAL circumstances with latex gloves and
the tweezers of quotation marks, and by diluting them in each other . . . so
I suppose language always has ample resources to re-ironicize even the most
brilliant synthesis of the ironic and the sincere, to re-alienate the labour
that committed genuine sentiment to a rhetorical manifestation.  whether or
not, and how (my uneasy ventriloquism above) those resources become embodied
as interpretation depends on . . . what?  I can't remember now, after the
Basilisk fantasy.  depends on an interaction between poem and readerly
attitudes in which we should look to see what the reader has to gain by which
disbeliefs he or she chooses to suspend (and also whether those choices can
be related to habits as well as goals)?

love,
Jow

> Sempervivum
>
> Against entropy, inertia, every fall,
> his skeleton rises
> full of smiles
>
> our footling alpha
> or rather his
> so self-possessed, lissom,
>
> stumbling, holding his loft,
> then down, his sorrow
> sudden, a missile
>
> flung against flaw
> which he just as soon erases
> steering his listing frame
>
> once more towards the sky. Little leaf
> sing high your rising song:
> all flesh is light.