Sherry Chandler » 2005 » October » 13
Frank Bidart, Star Dust: Poems (Farrar Straus Giroux)
Brendan Galvin, Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005 (Louisiana State University Press)
W.S. Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press)
John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander: New Poems (Ecco)
Vern Rutsala, The Moment’s Equation (The Ashland Poetry Press)
This post was written by sherry
The other night watching No Direction Home, I heard Alan Ginsberg describe Dylan’s performing style as “becoming the column of air” or words to that effect. I pricked up my ears. That statement speaks to my belief that poetry is of the body, thrown by the voice and caught by the ear.
But then I read a statement such as this, at dbqp and I am reminded that poetry is of the page, an artifact.
All poetry of the page is visual, and much more so than prose, which merely fills the page in a predictable and unalterable manner. Poetry proclaims its visual presence, and it is the line itself, that simplest of features, that it uses to make this claim. Flip through a book that holds a poem only here and there, and the poems will jump off the page at you. Their general thinness and the jagged ends of their lines set the poems off as if in relief.
I am much more interested in this sound/sight dichotomy than in the accessible/inaccessible fight. Maybe it’s just because I’m all on the surface myself. No depths to plumb, no mysteries.
This post was written by sherry
