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If a Poem’s Margins Could Be Modeled on a Coastline…
The ringing of a carriage return on an old Remington adjusted to resemble a wave’s crash
w/ its line-breaks based on breakwaters
and quays created by an indent key
because sand from silicon is a tempo-template as measured as any poetic timekeeper
where what is littoral (and litter-bearing)
is also literal (and letter-borne)
on a staggered margin mimicking a rising and lowering of tides
just as surf’s initial s and terminal f form a foaming hiss
a “bay” is a howl and a haven at once
its coral made c(h)oral(e) by its rip-currents
like letters formed out of seaweed by shipwreck survivors to signal to passing planes
said poem could deploy semicolons winking as if sun-blinded
an elemental poem whose palinode is its antipode
because a return bar can simulate a sandbar
and evoke a cove
forming wavelets out of cursive loops
and a coastline as crumpled as our verbal cerebrum
because “ink” dwells inside of brink
and because a poem’s “font” is named for its resemblance to agitated water
as if surf’s sibilance were a million breakings-off at mid-syll-
able
as if “foam” were “form” w/ a collapsed arch
and each caesura a tidepool where commas are tadpoles
where a peninsula juts and a pen jots
and a clam is a claim
and an otter an utterance
and sequoias stand like outsized exclamation points
between half-dune brackets
where “ors” form from cast-off oars and coastal ores
along parallel tide-lines looking like a bookkeeper’s columns
where a gull’s variable footprint is a cuneiform spoor
and a sea-lion’s rear fin dragged along sand is an only partial eraser
lyrically lagooned
on a prairie of a palimpsest
where a question mark is a spiral jetty
and an m-dash is a jutting pier
where atolls are wrung from a return carriage
because “beach” is “breach” minus its “r”
and so close to “beech”
and hence to “book”
and “tidal” calls up “title”
as surely as waves waive such claims.
Kimo Reder gained his PhD in English from UCLA in 2009 and is a professor of Language
and Literature at a small college in Newtown, PA (one of America’s crop-circle hotspots).
He has published in The Antioch Review, Callaloo, and Westwind, and is working on a book
concerning the neural overlap between speaking and tasting and its implications for
experimental verse. He hopes to assemble a ukulele/marimba/shakuhachi/gravikord ensemble
capable of playing the music of Moondog, Mingus, and Monk someday.
Email: Kimo Reder
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