Last book read – Like a lot who are doing this meme, I’ve got a few concurrently on the go. There’s the one above [I’m excerpting my other blog with this. Check there for full.]. I’m still working thru and P K Page’s Hologram homage and Under Tuscan Sun and resavoring With Issa. I might have to just buy my own copy of that last one so the library can get theirs back. A sample of Nelson Ball’s With Issa,

GOING ON
Blue
sky
bird
fly
sun
set
earth
turn

This looks simple and is and isn’t.
The first pair is an adjective and a noun, the last 3 stanzas are noun and an action. That sets the first off grammatically from the rest, the last 3 being 3 of a kind. It puts the poem off center instead of in easy halved balance.
The images can group and regroup in many ways by how the chosen words are drawn together by their shapes, sounds, ideas or placement. If it were set on the page differently, the weight of each word would be different. For example,
Blue sky, a bird flies.
Sun sets and earth turns
This would be quite another type of utterance. It would be a ho-hum descriptive of a particular present time and bird when we don’t happen to know the species name.
As is, there’s something more essential set up in the choice words. There’s the consonance of blue and bird, the rhyme of sky and fly that with the slowness of line break doesn’t feel like cutesy couplet.
The motion when you cross stanzas of what is side by side makes another set of seeing the scene, going on blue, sky bird, fly sun, set earth, turn, going on blue… makes a sort of reflection or verbal counterpart to the cycles of bird wheeling and earth and sun turning. The poem does a repeating cycle within itself of stillness of only sky, a new part of motion, a bird’s flight, stop for day and sun pausing and then earth rolling on.
The pairing of sun and earth as the basic minimal forms matched with the set of stillness of set and turn in motion.
We are in the pared essentials here. The set and sun are a match in consonants while the earth and turn match in vowels in slant rhyme.
If he chose to use sun rise instead of sunset the ideas would be regrouped so that there would be more tethers between sky, fly and rise. All would be with a sense of motion instead of the sun being solid and coming to a hidden stillness. The sky might be the constant one but by being blue and us knowing it doesn’t stay blue, there would be more a sense of being transitory.
Visually, and perhaps to some accents, there’s almost a closing couplet of slant rhyme of sun and turn that echoes the first shape of first two stanzas with the y that pair off. I wonder why he capitalized the first B so it doesn’t pair off with the other b to package the two stanzas neatly into two ascenders of b, two descenders of y. Would it be too even and self-containing and close it off from the 2nd half of the poem?
The very boom-boom matched pair of stressed S words gives a solidity that doesn’t happen with “sun rise” or worse, “sun rises” adding a two syllable word to the mix. It would add a tension, an off-centredness perhaps but in the tiny scale of the images, it would be almost a stage whisper to add another syllable, especially there where it wouldn’t balance physically with the title that has its own internal tension in context. The title is present continuous, which is repeated habit, or right now, yet at the same time the poem is speaking to something which is also out of time and eternal scale.
The little poem is calming in its simplicity and yet makes the brain wheel at how easily a different word or spacing could throw off the effect.

Side note: It would be a sidenote if I could do a textbox here which technically I can’t so I’ll settle for new post.

It’s funny, when people do this book meme that’s going around, and list genre novels people pop up and say oh yes, I love that book too. Most people seem to have listed novels, and classic novels.

I’ve heard people criticize people who list what poetry they read (not for this meme but in general) in a way that doesn’t happen when people list the sci-fi or fantasy they consume. (One can’t afford to accommodate detractors into one’s reckoning or one would always be silent or apologetic.)

I wonder why. What would the basis be, if what I observed is representative?

Is poetry positioned differently, not as a neutral pleasure so much? Is it groupism? Some tribalism? Is it about audience or ascribed motivation?

Is it because the relationship between novel and reader and poetry book and reader are different? How so? If I write about a novel I read, 200,000+ people have read it (perhaps because Oprah told them to). The writer can’t track all the responses. There’s a gap there. There isn’t a need for accountability. There’s anonymity of writer and of reader.

More poetry is self-published than novels. The scale of readership is smaller, unless you’re Billy Collins perhaps. If I write about a poetry book I read, the circulation is smaller and the probability of the writer tracking feedback is higher.

That happens in genre fiction too when it’s an audience with a small vocal fan base.

More people read novels who never write any nor aspire to, but it seems more people write poetry than read it.

The first stage of poetry is to actively write and say omg, what is this strange prose that fell out of me, omg it’s a poem isn’t it and look at it like the measles before you realize this fascinating spots mean that you may be fevered and ill before long.

On the other hand the first stage of introduction to novels is to passively read? Is that true or would have any bearing? I think I disagree with myself. Poetry is at its base form motion, repeated sounds of babbling first speech and extends to things more complex than novels. We are exposed to poetry in lullabies and music. Where does proto-novel come in? First short bedtime stories? How long does a narrative have to be before it is structurally showing the person the story arc and rudiments or full-scale novel?

Let’s say we not consistantly exposed to or develop neither novel or poem before the other. I’m not sure I know enough about people who read novels to generalize their relationship to the novels, novelists or each other.

Is it because when people say what novels they read, novels are more likely to be recognized with there being fewer publishers and titles of novels? Although dialogue between a reviewer and an author does happen, reviews or criticism is a little different than just a fan acknowledgement or a here’s what I did today, groceries, read this book, went to work, and called dear old dear.

Is the relationship between reader of poetry is more likely peer to peer than the reader of novel-reader to novelist which tends to be more unidirectional, producer and consumer? Does that then skew interpretation into power dynamics being presumed and explain why I have the sense that stating what I’m reading when its poetry has a different weight than stating what I’m reading when it’s novels? It’s a showing of cards? A showing of business cards? Or people are just more opinionated on particular poets in a way they aren’t of particular novelists? Or is it a matter of who I am reading who as individuals happen to interpret differently? If it were not known that I write poetry would it be another ballgame? (or card game?)

If I pretend I write novels, would that change dynamics of how one interprets a statement of who oen reads? Would people think that to say what novel I like would be a attempt to rub elbows and create allegiances instead of being flat as when I am not writing novels?

If I talk about poetry, is it presumed I know what I’m talking about so it’s different than when I give a general opinion on a novel? When I talk about a novel, I don’t get technical at all in my appreciation the way I do when I talk about poetry…

I think that’s off track. What I hear is not people leveling any criticism about me writing about books I like but that when others write about their reading lists of novels people buzz about looking for recommendations and its a fun place but when people list what poetry they read, there’s more of a feeling about a blog of politics and competition and back channeling remarks of snideness, of jealousy, of nitpicking, of criticism rather than love of books and language. That’s what baffles me. Why the difference? People reading novels want to hear a good story and people reading poetry want to gossip up a good back story?

I think it likely a sampling error on my part. Too little to go on.

This week’s prompt for week 69 is Juicy at OneDeepBreath.

raspberry picking
father’s arthritic hands
iodine on joints

There’s something ever so pleasing about Geof Huth’s THE ee. I keep coming back to it. It has such a 3-D architectural feeling and such symmetry. Although what Dan Waber did was rather fun. How’d he do that? And Irving Weiss’ reminded me of a light sculpture by Ingo Maurer. The site is flashed based so impossible to point to anything in particular but I mean the 2003 light fixture that is layered plates of glass, moulded with a scribble sketch of a candelabra. Embedded in the glass are LED lights so it becomes both a stylized image and functional version…I’d rather own, or rather make mamo nouchies but the concept behind the LED light is much more appealing.

When a poem is universal sentiment, the vagueness put out can be received with roughly the same vagueness. It floats over the culture. Maybe its done in doggeral, maybe in haiku, maybe in free verse or some concrete form. It doesn’t matter if the content is general, say, Mom sees child fall and then stand and laugh. She feels, my! child ages so fast. End of story. The story would be the same anywhere.

The particulars of identity or future potential or skin tone or day before or whether there is a remote war like Canada with Afghanistan or immediate war with armed guards around. None of that bears into a poem that is of abstracts of contentment or shift from sadness of lifespeed to hope of innocence and now, or what have you.

On the other hand a cultural reference point can be so immersive as a distinct lived experience, that to an outsider, it can’t be as rich. The writing can represent and carry as a subset of what it was created as and in.

When a piece of poetry is particularly embedded in a time and place, such as Spahr and the Iraq war it can’t travel with all its resonance. It can resonate. It can be heard. It can stand on its own, without someone’s direct knowledge of the event personally or in a broad social sense. The words can be an entry point and teacher to a social significance, a part of someone getting contact with the information.

At the same time it is incompletable without the shared direct experience and the reinforcing of people you actually know who actually care about the event in question. The reading will be shallower. There is data loss and data imposition, which there always is in communication. There is data gain and data reception which there is even if the writing was done over a millenium ago, with Li Po. We imagine we understand and can cross the bridge of words to another experience in the rhythm and choice of concepts presented whether contemporary or history-vetted writing. What works is what communicates, person to person, thru page of people ready to receive and the page, inert, but with capacity to give.

Is it more maddening to question a page for more elaboration or a face-to-face person who doesn’t know the answers either?