[New-Poetry] Dirty silence

[David Graham]

On Aug 31, 2009, at 9:21 PM, Bob Grumman wrote:

> What poem is the dirty silence passage from, by the way, James?  I  
> don't remember it.  I suspect the context makes the meaning of the  
> passage, uh, less clear.
>
> --Bob

===============



The Creations of Sound



If the poetry of X was music,

So that it came to him of its own,

Without understanding, out of the wall



Or in the ceiling, in sounds not chosen,

Or chosen quickly, in a freedom

That was their element, we should not know



That X is an obstruction, a man

Too exactly himself, and that there are words

Better without an author, without a poet,



Or having a separate author, a different poet,

An accretion from ourselves, intelligent

Beyond intelligence, an artificial man



A distance, a secondary expositor,

A being of sound, whom one does not approach

Through any exaggeration. From him, we collect.



Tell X that speech is not dirty silence

Clarified. It is silence made dirtier.

It is more than an imitation for the ear.



He lacks this venerable complication.

His poems are not of the second part of life.

They do not make the visible a little hard



To see nor, reverberating, eke out the mind

On peculiar horns, themselves eked out

By the spontaneous particulars of sound.



We do not say ourselves like that in poems.

We say ourselves in syllables that rise

 From the floor, rising in speech we do not speak.



--Wallace Stevens





========================================
David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu

Home Page:
http://web.me.com/drjazz

Poetry Library:
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