[New-Poetry] Re: Gilbert

[Anny Ballardini]

(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

MISTAKE
that was his heart beat
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Anny Ballardini 
  To: NewPoetry: Contemporary Poetry News &Views 
  Sent: Friday, September 01, 2006 11:46 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Re: Gilbert


  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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