[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 the
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 a 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. And not all that 
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 a 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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