[New-Poetry] Re: Gilbert

[Anny Ballardini]

I couldn't agree more with Finnegan here. I think 
(I sometimes think)

all what I have tried to do in writing was to try to bring into words the expression of the impression I wanted to express
since by the human being there is no resistance
there is no dull continuance

(I remember this friend of my father, a doc, who measured his blood pressure while comfortably reading a couple of paragraphs and registered the strong oscillations

then there is no meter

unless
you want to write a little lecture for those who have problems in memorizing and you sing-song it nicely so that it is easier for them to remember.
This is what I think.


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: JforJames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Friday, September 01, 2006 10:48 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Gilbert


  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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