At 03:27 PM 10/7/2003, Rebecca wrote:
>By altering
>this chronology of narrative markers or erasing it altogether
>various realities in the poem can become sort of coterminously
>past, present, future or some combination thereof. For instance
>I'm thinking of this poem by Vallejo, where the first two lines
>are:"The suit that I wore tomorrow/hasn't been washed
>by my laundress" where what "has been" becomes a future
>loss and the persistence of past love within that future
>loss by the end of the poem.
Well, there we are. For over a year I have been battling with one poem
that at one point I thought was done, except that in reading it over I
discovered its (for me) real subject and the damn thing felt and became
totally out of balance. It's an experiment in working with three levels of
time feeding ultimately into a series of singular moments that reflect each
other: but the climactic moment of the poem breaks away from the
"experiment" of interweaving episodes into the present and frankly takes
over the emotional core of the piece...and this is maybe 50 lines before
the end of something that runs over 200. It also, not coincidentally,
works with the fixed and repeatable--timeless?--art of opera as one of the
levels: Verdi's Otello, born in 1888 of a play produced about 1602, but
always in the world 16th century Cyprus regardless of when it is
revived. And that is juxtaposed with OJ Simpson's flight from the police,
because the central action of the poem occurs in a very specific moment in
time, June 17, 1994. How do you weave all this and more (I sound like a
carnival barker) into something cohesive and coherent? CAN you? What has
to be collapsed for this to work? My first idea was to simply proclaim the
artifice. Maybe that is the correct path--but I am so condition to trying
to hide the superstructure that I'm not comfortable with it.
Add to this that the poem grew out of comments to me by CD Wright on a very
early draft from 1996, and my reading last winter of Frank Stanford, and
you've got a potential mess. But I'm thinking that maybe it's time to
return to the mess and see just how much of a mess it is.
Ken
-------------------------
Kenneth
Wolman http://www.kenwolman.com
http://kenwolman.blogspot.com
"Sometimes the veil between human intelligence and animal intelligence
wears very thin--then one experiences the supreme thrill of keeping a cat,
or perhaps allowing oneself to be owned by a cat."--Catherine Manley
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