Thanks, Doug
That's patient and kind of you.
The poem, with its knowledge and perceptions, had a complex origin which
is probably of no interest; but its data was dispersed in me, if one
thinks of it as mapped, until I, the writer of this email, saw a bird set
down in that intertidal, on the edge of blurry; then the verse began to
coalesce; and its problems began to stick out like elbows; and "he" was
the best construct this side of truthfulness to accommodate the sticking
out
L
On Mon, May 14, 2012 17:39, Douglas Barbour wrote:
> I think 'in a mode of dance' sets the whole rest up, in a most
> interesting manner, Lawrence.
>
> Thinking 'active verbs,' I might have just written 'danced,' or something
> like that, but all the kind of perception that follows follows from that
> recognition in the 'he'. So it's both a poem of percepts & of the
> perceiver's mind in action....
>
> Doug
> On 2012-05-12, at 11:34 AM, Lawrence Upton wrote:
>
>
>> A bird, landing on the rubble
>> in a mode of dance, on its own between high and low tide, hard by
>> remnants, collapsing now, tumbled, of a quay from before ocean led the
>> land edge stepping backward,
>>
>> appears to be all white, too far for him to identify. He thinks, briefly,
>> of butterflies, the way it fluttered after its feet had touched on to a
>> stone, a stark light hue compared with darkness beneath that.
>>
>> It is avian; and that's not all:
>> he hadn't known he knew these things nor seen a structure in that heap
>> until his lithe concentration of memory and eyes and thought gave
>> intimate pattern to shapes.
>>
>>
>>
>> -----
>> Lawrence Upton
>> Visiting Fellow, Music Dept,
>> Goldsmiths, University of London
>> New Cross, London SE14 6NW
>> ----
>>
>>
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
> http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations & Continuations 2 (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=962
> Wednesdays'
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10
> .html
>
>
> The postliterate sensibility is offended by anything that isn’t
> television, views with suspicion the compound sentence, the subordinate
> clause, words of more than three syllables. The home and studio audiences
> become accustomed to hearing voices swept clean of improvised literary
> devices, downsized into data points, degraded into industrial-waste
> product.
>
> Lewis Lapham
>
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-----
Lawrence Upton
Visiting Fellow, Music Dept,
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross, London SE14 6NW
----
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