Alliteration is overdone in the phone book, if you ask me.
-----Original Message-----
>From: Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]>
>Sent: Nov 27, 2014 8:56 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: the avant garde vs. the lyrical
>
>Hi Michael,
>As Van Morrison has it in one of his songs:
> "When people understand what I say,
> There'll be days like this."
>As well as when he cites Blake's Four Zoas or Patrick Kavanagh, his own
>compositions sound mercifully different from the telephone book. Though I
>regret missing what must have been a galvanizing performance from the
>Toronto Telephone Directory.
>Jamie
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: [log in to unmask]
>Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2014 11:55 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: the avant garde vs. the lyrical
>
>Hi Jamie
>
>I didn't understand everything you said but if I were to perceive and argue
>for lyricism in a phone-book context that would be very far indeed from
>conceiving it as a practical song-text, so I think Van Morrison's
>hypothetical honour would be saved.
>
>Obviously the shared assumption of this classic of blurb-hyperbole is that
>the telephone directory is NOT a good song-text; and of course I agree with
>this. Popular song is very much wedded to the drama of shaped syntax so I
>don't think name-lists or street-signs have a lot of potential as
>song-lyrics. For me one of the core fascinations of sound poetry is how do
>you give it that line in the absence of syntax, how do you stop it being
>just a succession of sound-effects.
>
>I think most of us recognize a list to be a mechanical sort of thing,
>something it would be a challenge to put any feeling into reciting. But
>there's no doubt that a list can sometimes be very eloquent. I always
>eagerly examine the shopping lists that other people leave in supermarket
>trolleys, though it feels a bit intrusive to be doing it, they betray so
>much about someone's life. Few diary-entries can evoke memory so precisely
>as an old list of , say, debt-juggling or gift ideas for relatives. We
>nature-lovers are addicted to itemizing our field experience in "arid"
>lists.
>
>The counterintuitive prominence of the list as a structural component in
>modern poetry maybe has something to do with a recognition that description
>always detracts from the bare name. Say "elm" and in a certain sense you
>say all; more than if you try to evoke "the scrubby tangled weave of
>coarsetoothed leaves" or something of that sort.
>
>I'm rambling.. blame the web conference I'm listening to.
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