I have posted this several times since Mark's email which I am replying
to, but the message kept getting sent back because of the its
formatting, no matter how i simplified it--finally I retyped the poem &
hope this goes through. AF
On Sep 2, 2005, at 9:05 PM, JISCMAIL LISTSERV Server (14.4) wrote:
>
> Mark, Do you honestly think I would think that Bob meant form as in
> the sonnet in that quote in his letter to Olson? Is your raging
> desire to have a fist fight with some kind of stereotypical
> preconception of a new formalist getting the better of your common
> sense? I am sure there are plenty of party-liners who would love to
> come on this list and give you the kind of "definite answers" you seem
> to be looking for. I am not one of them. No wonder you are bored, if
> that's what you want. Bob was a wise person who loved poetry too
> much, at least when I knew him towards the end of his life, to get
> polarized into fights about the right way to write it. I also doubt
> that he would have underestimated the possiblities of the sonnet in
> any facile way (his last book is largely in iambic pentameter heroic
> couplets, and he told me, "Meter was in my poems all along but most
> people didn't see it--so they were surprised to see it in my late work
> but it was there all along--it just became more obvious later.")
>
> "How about, as Steve Vincent suggested, you illustrate
> something--anything--with your own practice in the form of a
> poem--one of your own, please."
>
> i don't recall Steve suggesting that but sure, as a newbie I am not
> sure exactly what a snapshot is but here is a poem, on a topic sort of
> related to the one Alison posted. It is an attempt to illustrate how
> the physical pulse of repeating beats does not feel to me as if it is
> closing down possibilities but instead opening up into other parts of
> the brain, altered states of perception. Maybe the 3-beat groove here
> partly evokes Dickinson, i don't know. Mammoth cave in Kentucky is 33
> miles of pitch black tunnels long, for those who haven't seen it.
Meeting Mammoth Cave, Eight Months Pregnant
In the night to my humanness
the unparticled has poured,
no beam will sink or angle,
no slow new mineral drip
through the circling ceiling
(loud strength of a darkenss
only dark can reassure
(solid cavern's holding
to hollow the beautiful
carrying dark to hold me,
to empty the slippery
(The loud strength of a darkness
only dark can reassure,
(solid cavern's holding,
No beam will sink or angle,
open cavern's holding,
in the rock to my humanness
unparticled and poured
to hollow the beautiful
(Into no circumference.
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