Peter wrote:
> I think the ethic is, and I think a still agree
> with it, that writers don't have the right to claim so-called "musical"
> prowess by manipulating page-space, as for example in use of line-ending to
> shift surprise or foil expectation or create a semantic syncopation, that
> that's not what poetic melopoia is about and rather it represents a cheap
> and theatrical substitute for a true poetic engagement with language.
Tho` there are umpteen examples available of Prynne, even
(especially?) in post-White Stones work, using line-ending to shift
surprise or foil expectation or create a... If lineation has evolved
to cope with the available repertoires of rhyme and metre,and/or to
cope with respiratory time signatures, a poetics which both
concentrates the poetic qualities of the evolved traditions and
disperses them right along and across the lines, rather than socking
it to us at the start and at the end, can partake of a variety of
prosaic rhythms while utilising indentations and/or stanzaic
structures which do, as Peter/JHP say, alter the focus of our
engagement with a text. If anyone`s seen the first book, Force of
Circumstance and Other Poems, you can see the signature "mortis key"
lineation take shape towards the end, a shape which has precursors in
OE and ME poetry but which, by Kitchen Poems, has taken on a new,
quite shockingly (for me) arbitrary quality which you never quite
get used to.
The supposedly tawdry dicking about with line-endings mentioned
above by Peter would risk what Pete`s re-lineation of the line from
HWWR risks: choreographing a rather easily temporary poetic halt, on
the road to a relatively stable, communicable meaning; that is, what
a full, Prynnean marshalling of poetic resources would infinitely
postpone, like Keston say. Nevertheless, like I started telling,
Prynne does have line-endings (how could he have not?) and they do
do the work they have always done - they`re just not, in Prynne`s
case, the only place where that work is being carried on. You could
say that the space between every word in late Prynne is a line-
ending.
robin
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