A bundle of 50 sticks for Joseph Cornell and others
is the full title of the poem to which Keston refers. I don't properly
understand his objections but I think it has to do with not enough doubt,
with too much certainty, with a lack of interrogation of the fragments
assembled. I think perhaps Lee's descrioption of what Eliot would have
called the "embryology" is not helpful to the experience of the poem. The
two can be more easily severed on the page.
But the effect of these "sticks" in their entireity to me is quite radical: the
sections are barely there: "the wind." "that's it" "(space)". This is not
notation. Neither do I find the cumulative effect of this certain of itself.
The moments of reflection are almost too brief to constitute epiphany as
such, however much they are aware of themsleves: "Walk through the
words".
The clarity of the fragments is strangely disturbed by the apparent
"process" in which they are placed. "Cumulative" is perhaps the wrong
word, because nothing builds up. The sticks register isolation, mostly, but
not one that will be redeemed by structure. Doubt hangs in the spaces
between the sections, a doubt that risks the possibility that what has
proceeded might not amount to a poem at all: he quotes Raworth's "this
trick doesn't work" and Tom's "Stag Skull Mounted" is its sister poem. (Or
poem poem). Its scraps of feeling are balanced delicately against a
silence of non-feeling.
That's my quick take on it anyway.
Robert
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