Two Versions of Fire Work

With his impeccable horticultural acumen Richard Foerster takes the reader on a tour of a plant through both is parts in space and its development in time.

I first encountered the poem as the penultimate poem in The Burning of Troy. I then located it online in the Alabama Literary Review Volume 17 (Spring 2007) where I found it displayed in "couplets" or rather stanzas of two lines. For me, the sweep was lost. The white space lead to too much emphasis on the words at the end of lines which obscures some of the internal repetitions such as "seadrift" and "drift". In the book, the poem is reminiscent of an ode with movements. The stanzas cohere as elemental shifts threaten to make the whole edifice explode — very like a poppy tossing its petals to the winds. But look at the endings of the stanzas for the metamorphosis is primely featured: "accidental loppings" "splendid seduction" "at a stroke, become" "rattling pods". So the eye travels along the fuse.

Flame
I don't want to think about anything, except to become language. —Stanley Kunitz
Once again the poppies: I'd stay the wind to keep their pure scorch, this conflagration thrusting up from mulish roots despite years of my spade's accidental loppings. This morning it seemed a hundred crimson Hydra heads rose through the seadrift fog, the kind of monstrous beauty we demand of myth in the aftermath of winter. That's the problem, isn't it: the splendid seduction of these Salomes, what they unveil in stages, the black intent they keep hidden till the end within scrolled parchments, the taunting logic we can't help thoughtlessly lusting after, and would, at a stroke, become, even as the leaves drift toward jaundice beneath brittle, rattling pods.	Once again the poppies: I'd stay the wind to keep their pure scorch, this conflagration thrusting up from mulish roots despite years of my spade's accidental loppings. This morning it seemed a hundred crimson Hydra heads rose through the seadrift fog, the kind of monstrous beauty we demand of myth in the aftermath of winter. That's the problem, isn't it: the splendid seduction of these Salomes, what they unveil in stages, the black intent they keep hidden till the end within scrolled parchments, the taunting logic we can't help thoughtlessly lusting after, and would, at a stroke, become, even as the leaves drift toward jaundice beneath brittle, rattling pods.

Sometimes thinking about language means thinking about layout. The white space determines rhythm and whether or not the reader is invited to linger and simmer until the words are burned into memory crackling like brittle, rattling pods offered to a flame. One of these versions burns. The other sputters.

And so for day 1490
11.01.2011