Good God! Seems easy and pointless and dull. But, I am deaf to this -- I lack art.
Frederick Pollack <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: Halvard Johnson
To: Johnson Halvard
Sent: Monday, October 01, 2007 7:48 AM
Subject: Poems by others: Clark Coolidge, from At Egypt -- #IX
At Egypt, IX
Morning muezzin in orange and a mosquito
rooster donkey tree toad and chainsaw snore
the dart of a needle through felt trauma
they mass and band, collide in screens for light
unlung the tongue in far head, wiping the mist from the whisper
Only the spoken
Words follow
But it is in the flying up again
in the seeing back where the rock heads
splitting soft to the forces that take time
running into siftage of some edge, a table say
or soda hoard no matter its age, a sty
uncleared in whatever tongue, washed in time and huge
as any language mass
I see it stretched dry down to a Utah brown
the heaven's floor more sinister from a silver cylinder
into the far on the tones of dry river bleaks and quints
they all retreat into source cake Sahara, where nothing
ends they steal chickens, it's made of leavings
Plain isn't it? that I seize and clap from the bends
the air capsizes and tea spills on the dust prints of a floor vast
or is it actually soft, all this distance, these tabled plans?
here you can see down all the roads back from, a lashed dragging
to the sides, as in all wrong ways, you must wait till the driver slows
stops this whistling stall and turns to us
From what is a flight to start?
--Clark Coolidge
fr. At Egypt
[Great Barrington, Mass.: The Figures, 1988]
Halvard has sent some good Poems By Others, but to this one I can only say I'm sorry. I really dislike Language poetry. This poem is a good example of why. I squint at one or another passage and tentatively find some meaning in it, then repeat the process and posit - with no confidence - another meaning, and after four or five I think Why am I doing this? OR I lose focus and go for a general impression; see "dust" and "brown" and think, well, yes "Egypt" is in the title and he SO cleverly compares it to "Utah" - duh, it must be brilliant! And of course there's the obligatory reader-nudging reference to Language in "language mass." Langpo is such a versatile fad: it encourages self-congratulatory academic reference-picking and middlebrow vague-mindedness at the same time. No wonder it goes on and on. Or else my dislike of it is the result of some unimaginative meanness or insensitivity within me. Members of various cults have told me I have that. So, once again, I'm sorry.
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