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That's an interesting commentary, Michael, thanks. I tend to feel though that it is unfruitful to expect human language to speak deer or tree. Of course our descriptions are not their reality, our language conveys our reality. It can only symbolise what is beyond it, we cannot reach through and touch the pure inviolate unutterable noun in it. We can certainly draw word pictures of it, or of the scent of it, and lots of unrelated nouns floating about create no dynamic of representation. I'm not proposing closed box naturalism, thinking more of drawing human clouds. Punctured and punctuated by holes where the rabbits have torn through.

best

dave

On 4 May 2018 at 01:16, Luke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Both Zukofsky and Olson, who I've just been reading, link the image to "nouns" that don't do violence to each other / "out plus in" as the proper noun. So I'm really sympathetic to your analysis, cheers,

Luke

On 3 May 2018 at 14:21, Jamie McKendrick <00001ae26018af73-dmarc-[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Michael, thanks - honoured to be included. As you’ll have guessed the counter example wasn’t offered so much to refute the thesis as to complicate things.
   Anecdote is always used negatively in relation to poetry. I can sort of see why, though it makes me bridle a bit. But your point about the range of tenses with regard to narrative is a crucial one, I think. And there’s much else of interest.
    (Oddly enough, I began to pay attention to the elided form (he’d etc.) in relation to prose. For the first novel I translated, I had an (otherwise good) copyeditor who spent an inordinate amount of time weeding out these elisions. So a bothersome slow negotiation had to take place where I conceded a few and defended the many. It left me with a residual nervousness about the form, which I’m still not quite free of. It’s never loomed up in that way in writing a poem where the right form never seems in doubt.)

Jamie

> On 3 May 2018, at 13:25, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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> http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.co.uk/2018/05/the-verb.html
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> A follow-up, still very much a speculative draft, to last summer's piece about the word "I'd" .
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> It takes in some of the subsequent discussion here: Jamie McK gets a namecheck.
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> Michael