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Am I to say 'Open wide', to extract a nubile tongue from a distant cheek...or is the cheek semantically further afield ? Best wishes Bruce -----Original Message----- From: British & Irish poets [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of jesse Sent: 12 February 2013 02:36 To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Knee-deep in Allen Fisher--Boop tone et. allen 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