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")