The Heavy hitter Mark Weiss weighted in with some 20-stone, maybe even a bit
heavier (?), advice on this massive issue. But we're certain that he knows
in his deepest guts that with Allen Fisher's most thickly striated work,
larded like marble cake with learning, nothing is ever exactly as it's
freighted. It would take a week of slimming down the corpus of his
linguistically innovative settings, to allow Mark to pick the teeth of
Fisher's most arcane and innovative intentions, as well as flense the fat
and taste the fruit of Fisher's inventions. But Mark Weiss' omnivorous
reading, and his obvious long feeding at the common spigot of the moderns
and post-post-post moderns, makes his holding forth on any poetic manner,
and no matter how briefly as in this case, much better than many others'
labored breathing.
But to get back to Allen Fisher's boop tone. I believe we haven't taken
into consideration the obviously self-reflexive word "scans"--which, if we
unpack the allusion, would allow us not only to see scans as a technical
term, but one belonging more properly to the poetic lines presently under
consideration--all of which once again calls for a reconsideration of the
multivalent intention that lurks behind virtually all of Allen Fisher's
writing. And I repeat that I would love to actually hear Mr. Fisher's
delivery of those lines, (his own, organic scanning on the breath, as it
were) and to ask him what leads him to break his lines in the manner that he
does in this Civic Crimes series and in many of his others. Maybe that also
needs to be documented and foot-noted. As in:
he scans for a
boop tone
what makes his breaking the line at "a" work in the manner that it really
does, or really doesn't?
why couldn't:
he scans for a boop
tone
work just as well? Or:
he
scans for a
boop
tone
or even a Lax-like:
he
scans
for
a
boop
tone
or even a more earthy, dialect or street-driven:
hey scans fora
bup
tawn
and yet again:
he scans
4-a
boop
tone
which could be scrawled by Banksy any where at all in everyone's city and be
an occasion for celebration among the upper crust.
Enjambments are the thumb-prints of master poets left behind on their works
for readers to shine an oblique light across in order to learn the glorios
warp and weft of the poem's texture in its virtuoso display of technique,
as well as for reader's admiration of the matrices of interconnecting
valences of meaning, sound, and situation, and finally, as they say in
Japan, for pure self-study in relation to the consequent aesthetic
ambiance.( Think of Leonardo with his brush, or red chalk and prepared
surface) We might also add that the subject of a poet's punctuation--or lack
of--is a clue to the immediate psychokinetic context in which the poem
assumes form--(think of Michelangelo with his hammer.) All of these issues
are brought up by scanning for boop tones, and for a singular request to
Google a boop "sound"--notice the difference--because in Allen Fisher, even
the smallest choice of word means worlds, but Mark Weiss also means worlds
in his diction as well, so we should also take into consideration, Mark
Weiss' implied deep-dish understanding of Fisher's poetic praxis.
Jess
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