[New-Poetry] Re: Gilbert

[JforJames at aol.com]

In a message dated 9/1/2006 4:05:41 PM Eastern Daylight Time,  
queenmouse at gmail.com writes:

Speaking  of deploying a 'sentence fragment' in a poem, has anyone noticed  
that an  annoying amount of contemporary poetry is written toward complying 
with  
grammatical rules?

I have noticed  this, and I am not certain if it is due to teaching 
composition so much as the  influence of teachers who are big on narrative clarity-- I 
studied with  Stephen Dobyns and Mary Karr at Syracuse University, and Paul 
Muldoon at  UMass, and all had very strong feelings about this subject. "A poem 
should be at least as well-written as  prose."






Suzzane,
That aphorism never made any sense to me. So improbably uttered by  that
Cantos guy who believed that poetry began to atrophy the farther  it got away 
from
music. I guess I've never had any trouble seeing poetry dispense with  the
formality of the proper sentence. Punctuation itself is a kind a pestilence  
when it
comes to poetry. The more I learn of languages other than English  the more
the conventions of our grammar seem arbitrary and capricious. So  little of it
(case endings, plurals, parts of speech, etc.) really important to  conveying 
one's thoughts, carrying over one's meanings, etc. None of it  important to
cadence and rhythm and the other sonic elements we call 'music' in  poetry.
 
If sentence fragments are used often, they'll certainly be recognized  as
a part of one's style; too often and they might become mannerism,  but
what happens for me, as a reader, is that I no longer notice that  language 
element as 'sentence fragment'. It becomes a unit of language bounded  by 
starting capital letter and the ending period. The period, in  poetry, for me 
then is nothing more than speech indicator of a full  pause, versus a 
comma's slight pause. Each could be indicated as easily with  a hyphen
and a dash, or a shorter and longer measure of blank space, being akin 
to verbal road signs.
Finnegan
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