Harriet, the entropisms theory is wild (in the best sense of the word.)
Theory today is still treated as if it emerged from a craniectomy
performed by Hermes on Zeus's head and still today theory priests stand
in guard over this brain growing out of their sacred Zeus. It
is an ancient rewritten patriarchal Greek myth. Get over it.
Prigonine was awarded a Nobel prize for his solution to entropy. Maybe
you should get one too? (The money could be useful, don't know about the
prize, though, myself.)
best wishes and loved reading the prose poem sample...
Chris Jones.
On Wed, 2003-01-29 at 12:17, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Dear Helen, Chris, and all:
>
> I love the prose poem. In my new book, DRAWING ON THE Wall (Marsh Hawk
> Press), I have several prose poems. But as early as l978 I published a book
> only of prose poems titled ENTROPISMS that James Laughlin wrote was "an
> important new direction in the evolution oif the prose poem as a literary
> form. Rimbaud would have liked these pungent, lambent little visions."
>
> In connection with recent questions about narrative in poetry, in my
> ENTROPISMS there is always an implied narrative -- though seemingly
> suppressed. But I would like to quote from a few of the entropisms in the
> book. Perhaps I should first explain what the word "entropisms" means since
> I made up the word. In the book I define the word in this way: "I combine
> the words entropy, tropism, trope to assert man's imagination in the face of
> the absurdity and chaos of our time. If entropy suggests the ever-increasing
> random 'mess' of the physical universe (a Buckminster Fuller definition), and
> tropism, a la Natahalie Sarraute, the unspoken, irrational undercurrent in a
> conversation, and trope the metaphor, then the entropism ties it all
> together, breaking down the aleatoric into a controlled formulation to
> achieve equilibrium for perception itself. To put it simply: the physical
> universe is entropic. Man's imagination is antientropic."
>
> Here are a few examples from the book:
>
> Currants in the pie. Red. Thick sweetened crust. Sitting on the
> picnic table.
> Plastic wine glasses. Two men stiff from swimming. They had placed
> their
> smiles on the lips of the women who were resting near the banks of
> the river.
>
> Caviar in the siler dish. Cocktail napkins. She thought she heard
> the chirping
> of a mouse within the walls. This distraction was rather pleasant
> between
> the clinking of a glass and the smothered sob of the articulate
> hostess.
>
> Drug addiction takes a long time to convince the victim that time is
> short.
>
> "Directly I'm told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me," said
> Virginia
> Woolf to Roger Fry as she watched the "fin rising on a wide blank
> sea."
>
> "Why," she asked. He replied, "why not." The moon sucked up the
> tide.
>
> .........................
>
> Oh, but I can't type out the whole book!
>
> Harriet
>
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