Stephen,
Perhaps we've followed a similar trajectory. I used to write fully, spillfully
even, across the line and the words and the punctuation. Then I fined it down
some years back - shorter lines, less punctuation, and weaselling out many
words.
From time-to-time I wonder if I've lost the baby with the bathwater. I'm only
speaking of myself, though there are always those voices one hears - mine
weren't Ginsberg or Pound, a different tradition or milieu - but I waver
always over how much of what is 'natural' (I use this term very advisedly) in
the way I write needs to be tempered. I have no wish to be tough at all or
even clean (messy can work OK as well) and I sometimes worry it just seems
clipped or curt rather than strong.
Thanks for yr genuine thought. The 'of' is slipping away. It was provisional.
Jill
> Way back in my twentiees my poems use to be full of "of"s . When I thought
> about it, my theory was that I liked "of" because it rhymed with 'love'
> (being implicit and not obvious)- and that was definitely probably the
> unconscious personal need - spilling over "of" by "of" at the time.
> Then I remember reading Allen Ginsberg somewhere in which he had a big
> diatribe against the use of "of" in poems. I suspect that was the shadow of
> Pound wanting to make words in poems as tough, clean and hard as carved or
> cut wood - objects.
>
> So naturally I began to practice not "of"ing my poems or feeling
> self-conscious when I did. Now I "of" whenever it seems accurate - Pound,
> Ginsberg or not.
>
> But genuinely, Jill, I do think the poem goes better without the "of."
>
> Stephen V
>
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