clauses making up conventional
sentences, the stacking being an adequate substitute for
standard punctuation:
there
are moments
when in the silent centre
of the rise and fall of a wave
fifty yards from the campfire
crackling under the black iron pan
the sportsman sees the fish and cuts the line
(Burton)
The
notation of cummings and some later modernists -opening to
word-play and figures by breaking conventional grammar and
isolating major parts of speech or placing them at the
beginnings of lines--is not evident in this book. Using that
notation, Burton's lines might start:
there are
moments when
in the silent
centre of the rise and
fall etc.
The notation of cummings, when it
works, is taken to the the rhythm of tentative or playful
thought. When it doesn't work it produces confusion. The
notation of Pound and Williams, when it works, is taken to
be the rhythm of discursive thinking. When it doesn't work
it sounds prosaic.
All
five poets are already practiced enough to avoid, most of
the time, the prosaic, even though they discourse on the
common themes of romantic and
modern poetry -- the lonely voyeurism of the poet (at home
only in early morning or late night, or in bars or cafes),
the evils of materialism, capitalism and industrialism (we
are all digits, etc), the hurtin' of sexual love. The secret
of the success of these poems is that there is no hint of
detachment -- of the library or the academy.
Any
such hint, of course, indicates pretension, and results in
polite silence and automatic exclusion from the inner
circle.
In discursive thinking, metaphors,
similes and other figures are taken as analogies or special
effects, useful but incidental to meaning. For these poets
the conceit or extended metaphor, the most discursive of
figures, is king:
yeah the sleeping
with their pillows . . .
they control everything
just try getting a hotel room . . .
without a bed in it ....
(Burton, "Enemy")
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