I finally realized that several people are unable to see how a jump-cut
could be used in a poem because their going by their definition of
"jump-cut," not mine (and the Merriam Webster's)--and they seem to think
the only definition that counts is theirs whereas I think their may be
okay as a specialist term but that mine is also okay as a term for
covering broader territory. As I did so, I suddenly realized also that
a visual poem of mine that I'd recently blogged about, then made the
first poem in a recent collection of my stuff (at
thisisvisualpoetry.com) used a jump-cut /as defined by Jeffrey /except
that its frames are paper, not celluloid--but they /could/ be
celluloid. It's at http://poeticks.com/single-entries/sleep.
Explanation: the poem is a single scene, "sleep." One "frame"
containing an edge of the first "e" has been deleted as have a few blank
"frames" following that one, and a frame containing an edge of the
second "e" in "sleep." The continuity of the sleep that's going on is
disturbed, the intent to cause the reader more vividly to experience
sleep as an entrance into another world.
Of course, I also use a zoom. I think I'd get the same effect without
it--but at a much lower intensity. There's change of color, too.
Thinking of the zoom, I wondered when that device was first used, and
when it came to be called a zoom. Seems to me it ought to have been as
startling and aesthetically effective as the jump-cut.
Cummings often used a pure jump-cut by breaking a line
"intra-syllablically." the single action of what the broken word
denotes is rendered discontinuous by removing a blank between two letters.
I don't call any of this or related visual poetry techniques jump-cuts,
though. I use that entirely for the linguistic jump-cut, as I define
it, in poetry that's nothing but words.
I'm making this post mainly as a way of exhibiting my poem, which is
very simple and--I'm pretty sure--a steal from a poem by a friend, but
which I really like.
--Bob
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