Hi Jon,
I have to chime in and say that
I don't think your revision is better. Your revision prettifies
the poem, and "vanished on the echoes of the plain" sounds
like something I have heard before, a sort of general gesture
at nostalgia or loss. It's that "sediment teeth excrement hair
bloodied nails sinews bones" and that "burst the thickening
membrane of Lethe" that bring the body and its difficulty
into the poem. For I don't think the poem is 'about' the
role of denial in war, though that may be a thread in the poem,
it seems to be 'about' something much more complex, the aborting
of language, and that metaphor of birth, "the thickening membrane"
that is connected to the "cord" the "bloody string" is integral
to that. Which is the messiness that the poem argues for, the
messiness of birth and the living body as opposed to the "rational
cleanliness" of the reports, where the "world is scrubbed back
to nothing." Your revision would make the poem much less than it
is, though it would then be more like poems that I've already
heard. I think, too, to develop this poem in an "orderly
and disciplined way" pruning it to a central idea that is much like
the common idea about Cassandra would be to treat it exactly
in the manner that the poem with its bloody and messy cord
of life and living language is against. As if to subject the poem
itself to "the infinite declensions of Sparta."
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
-------Original Message-------
From: Jon Corelis <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 06/14/03 07:16 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Cassandra
>
> There's some good stuff here, but it keeps getting lost amongself-conscious
verbiage. It needs great tightening up. Isn't this a better beginning:
alas for the towers of Ilium
vanished in the echoes on the plain
where grass fattens on tongues churned to rot
no syllables avail you here
mute as the dead are mute
language smashed still before its birth
[end beginning here, without dragging in Lethe at this point]
And the rest similarly could benefit by some pretty ruthless carving,
especially of rhetorical devices that call attention to themselves ("as if
one, as if one") [note: I know the poem I just posted myself was all one
big rhetorical device that called attention to itself but in that case
that
was the point.] More generally, though much of the poem is quite
impressive, I thought it early on lost track of the really brilliant idea
it
started out with: to use Cassandra as a metaphor for the role of denial
in
war, the shrieking "This is real, these are human beings" which everyone
thinks is hysterical because they are literally incapable of believing it.
I found myself wishing the poem would have developed this idea in a more
concentrated and disciplined way. If this poem could be made as taut and
spare as, say, H.D., then it would really be sometihing. Rereading the
Agamemnon might help. Or rereading H.D.
(I was just rereading the beginning of the Iliad myself, and it dawned
on
me how funny it is. There seems to be a definite subtext that among the
Achaean heroes we are basically in kindergarten: *ophra me oios Argeion
agerastos eo, epei oude eoike*: "Well I'm not going to be the only one
without a prize. It's not fair!")
==================================================
Jon Corelis [log in to unmask]
http://www.geocities.com/joncpoetics
==================================================
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